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Library of Che Theological Seminary 


PRINCETON - NEW JERSEY 


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FROM THE LIBRARY OF THE 
REVEREND JESSE HALSEY, D.D. 


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The Influence of the Bible 


By THOMAS TIPLADY 


The Influence of the Bible 
On History, Literature and Oratory . . $1.00 


Mr. Tiplady shows how the Scriptures constitute 
the master interpreter of human nature exhibiting a 
marvelous insight into character. Altogether, it is a 
volume of an unusually readable and deeply interest- 
ing sort. 


Social Christianity in the New Era | 
Second: Edition "is! 2) "esis. cide vee eae 


“But just as sure as the water wears away the 
granite so shall such books as this reshape and re- 
mould the world and bring in a new and better social 
order.”’—Boston Transcript. 


The Soul of the Soldier 


Echoes from the Western Front. With ° 
Frontispiece. Second Edition . . . $1.25 


“Filled with the love of his soldiers and the deep 
sense of their bravery and great achievement. 
Throughout one feels Mr. Tiplady’s actual closeness 
to the front. A brave and human collection of 
pictures from the war.”’ 

—New York Times Book Review. 


The Cross at the Front 


Fragments from the Trenches. With 
Frontispiece. Eighth Edition . . . $1.25 


““*Vivid’ is too dim a word to express the living 
pictures which this chaplain has seen in France. 
Some of the chapters are among the finest pieces of 
of pathos we have read anywhere. Read the book 
and you will be a better man for all your tasks.” 

—Chicago Standard. 





‘ 


the Bible 


On History, Literature, and Oratory 


By ee 


THOMAS TIPLADY 
Author of “‘ The Cross at the Front.’? 





New Yorre CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LONDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, 1924, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 


“‘ The Bible thoroughly known is a literature of 
itself—the rarest and the richest in all departments 
of thought or imagination which exists.’’-— James 
Anthony Froude, the historian. 

“T loved and valued the Bible, for almost to tt 
alone I owed my moral culture.” —Goethe. 

‘“‘In regard to the Great Book, I have only to 
say it 1s the best gift which God has ever given 
to man.’—Abraham Lincoln. ' 





PREFACE 


ANY years ago a traveler found 
M a Kaffir boy playing at marbles 
with a stone which looked very 
ordinary, until he took it in his hand and 
carefully examined it. After examination 
he declared the stone to be a diamond, and 
under the ground where the Kaffir boy 
played there are now the famous Kim- 
berley mines. For centuries men had 
walked over Kimberley’s dusty surface 
without suspecting their nearness to 
mines of wealth beyond the dreams of 
avarice. In like manner Europe, for 
ages, had in its midst a book of truth and 
beauty unequalled in literature, but to the 
mass of men it was a closed mine. Its 
discovery and reopening by Erasmus and 
Luther caused an infinitely greater sensa- 
tion than the opening of the Kimberley 
mines, and has enriched all nations. The 
sensation, however, is now over, so far as 
the Western nations are concerned, and 
familiarity is in danger of breeding con- 
7 


8 PREFACE 


tempt. The modest black binding of the 
Bible looks as uninteresting as the shafts 
of a diamond mine; and people are in 
danger of passing by it instead of going 
down into its depths for the enrichment 
of their minds and hearts. It is to draw 
the attention of gifted young men to the 
Bible as the supreme guide to leadership — 
in public life, literature, and oratory, that 
I have written this little book. To prove 
my points, I have found it necessary to 
call upon historians, authors, and orators 
to bear witness. The sources from which 
I have quoted are, as a rule, indicated in 
the text; and I wish to thank the authors 
and publishers most sincerely. I trust 
that the quotations will so whet the appe- 
tites of my readers that they will want 
more, and will therefore get the books of 
the authors mentioned, so that they may 
browse at their leisure and to their 
hearts’ content. 
BBS bye 


Tk. 
III. 


IV. 


Contents 


THE Book oF Books . 

Inspiration not Dictation — Supreme 
Book of Power — The Vision Splen- 
did — Course of History Changed 


THE BIBLE As A MEANS OF CULTURE 
Hebrew, Greek, and Roman — Life- 
giving Power of the Bible —A Fal- 
lacy — Culture: Ancient and Modern 


THE CREATIVE POWER OF THE BIBLE 
Popularity of the Bible — ‘‘Noblest 
Example of the English Tongue’? — 
The First Democracy 


Tue INSPIRING EFFECT OF THE BIBLE 

ON ENGLISH LITERATURE : 
Why Men are Great— The N ew 
Light — What Happened Three Cen- 
turies Ago 


BUNYAN AND THE BIBLE 

Lord Macaulay on Bunyan — Where 
Bunyan got his Style— Green and 
Hallam on Bunyan 


HEINE AND THE BIBLE : 
The “Plain Old Book” —“ The 
Aristophanes of Heaven’’ — The 
Failure of Philosophies — The King- 
dom of the Spirit 


11 
21 


33 


43 
50 


57 


10 


VI. 


VIII. 


IX. 


aia 


XII, 


CONTENTS 


THE BIBLE AND LITERARY STYLE 

A Portable University — The Nurs- 
ing Mother of Poets— Byron and 
the Bible—The Bible Ruskin’s 
Standard 


Tue AuTHOR’S LAMP AND LIGHT 

Addison’s Lamp — Handing on the 
Torch — A great Editor’s Testimony 
— Edward FitzGerald’s Bible English 


THE BIBLE’s TRANSMISSION OF LIFE 
Spiritual History of the Puritans — 
Terms on Which Life is Granted — 
Greek Youths and Hebrew Men — 
The Bible Faces all Facts 


ORATORS AND THE BIBLE . 

Lloyd George — Ramsay Macdon- 
ald — C. H. Spurgeon — Dr. Joseph 
Parker — Savonarola — Edward Irv- 
ing 


Stix Books THat Mabe LINCOLN 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 
Growth of Lincoln’s Greatness — 
Tendency of His Life — Lincoln and 
Bunyan — A Mind Saturated with the 
Bible — His Greatest Speech 


Tue Master Licut oF our KNOWL- 
EDGE OF HUMAN NATURE .. 

The Vital Nature of the Bible — Car- 

lyle on David— The Ascent of a 

Soul — Insight into Character — The 

Moulders of Men 


64 


75 


85 


97 


106 


117 


If 
THE BOOK OF BOOKS 


HE Bible was not written by an in- 
dividual. It was written by a race. 

It is not a wayside well built over 

a single spring, but a mighty river into 
which a million springs have poured their 
waters. In the Bible we have not one 
man’s experience of God, but a whole peo- 
ple’s. It covers not the brief span of an 
individual’s life, but the thousands of 
years through which a race lives. It re- 
cords the spiritual experience not of a 
chosen man but of a chosen people. The 
Bible holds the life blood of the Jewish 
race. It is a living thing, full of vitality 
and regenerating power. In it all that God 
meant to the Jewish people in their indi- 
vidual, social, and national life is distilled, 


preserved, and revealed to mankind. It 
11 


12 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


enshrines the soul of a people and is the 
Hebrews’ priceless legacy to the world. | 


The Legacies of Three Civilizations 

The Greeks taught the world Art and 
the love of beauty: the Romans taught it 
Law and ordered Government; but the 
Jews taught it Religion and Righteous- - 
ness. Hach of these ancient civilizations 
left mankind a priceless heritage, but the 
greatest of these gifts was the legacy of 
the Hebrews. The Jewish people were the 
‘‘ God-carrying people,’’ as the Russians 
loved to call themselves. They were re- 
ceivers of God and revealers of Him. 
They had a peculiar sensitiveness towards 
God. Sensitive as the negative plate of a 
camera, they received the impress of God . 
and revealed it to the world through the 
medium of the Bible. In the fullness of 
time there came to this people a full 
revelation of God. The Word became 
flesh and dwelt among them and they be- 
held His Glory. The record of this in- 
carnation of the Son of God and many of 
the words of Jesus are preserved in this 
wonderful book. Whatever truth the Holy 
Spirit may yet reveal to mankind, the 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 13 


Bible can never be dispensed with nor 
superseded. The living Christ is more to 
men than the Bible, but we have His own 
authority for saying that the Bible is the 
text-book which the Holy Spirit will ever 
use in teaching men divine knowledge. 
The scholar will need the help of the Di- 
vine Teacher if he is to fathom the depths 
of the text-book; but a study of the ways 
of Providence will, I think, show that the 
Divine Teacher felt the need of such a 
text-book in teaching men, and co-operated 
with saintly men in its preparation. ‘‘ For 
the prophecy came not in old time by the 
will of man: but holy men of God spake 
as they were moved by the Holy Ghost ’’ 
(II Peter 1:21). 


Insyration Not Dictation 

The word ‘‘ moved’’ is a perfect ex- 
pression of the meaning of ‘‘ inspiration.’’ 
When a poet has been deeply moved by his 
communion with Nature, the poem which 
springs to birth is not his alone. It is 
Nature speaking through him. The poet 
feels that something greater than himself 
has taken him in hand and is using him as 
a musician uses a violin. The poem grows 


14 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


up within him while he lies in a passive 
and dreamy mood. So pronounced was 
this feeling in Blake that he took no credit 
to himself for his poems, but regarded 
himself merely as an instrument writing 
as he was inspired by a power not him- 
self. The poet does not feel that he made 
his poem but that it was made in him. It 
is his own, and has all his characteristics, 
for it has soaked through his personality 
and taken the dye of his own mind, yet he 
does not feel that he created it. The poem 
is his and yet not his. It is something 
that entered into him, clothed itself in his 
characteristics, and passed out into the 
world. Hach poem he writes bears his 
likeness, but he does not feel that it is en- 
tirely his. In like manner, I take it, holy 
men of old were ‘‘ moved ’’ while in com- 
munion with God. In passive tranced 
mood they came under the influence of the 
Holy Ghost and experienced a spiritual 
exaltation unknown to them in ordinary 
moments. In these high moments they 
spake as they were moved to speak. 
Their nature vibrated with a music 
touched to life by a heavenly hand. The 
music took its form and tone from them, © 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 15 


but was not in essence their own. Hence 
the confidence of their declaration, ‘‘ Thus 
saith the Lord.’’ Some writers were 
moved more deeply than others, and the 
same writer was probably moved more 
deeply at one time than at another. What 
they wrote was theirs and yet not theirs. 
It was human and yet divine. There is 
little likeness, except in essence, between 
the writings of David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, St. 
Matthew, St. John, and St. Paul. In every 
case the writings are characteristic of the 
personality. The individual note blends 
with the universal and the human with the 
divine. One cannot say where the human 
ends and the divine begins. We cannot 
define the boundaries, and this inability 
has often been a rock of offence to the in- 
tellectual pride of man and a cause of con- 
troversy both within the Church and with- 
out. As in the person of Christ, the 
human and divine are inextricably min- 
gled. No man can mark where the one 
begins and the other ends. There are 
some things too mysterious for man to de- 
fine and too profound for him to dog- 
matize about; and the inspiration of the 
Bible is one of them. 


16 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


The Supreme Book of Power 

Was it not because Christ was so su- 
premely human that men came to realize 
that He was more than human? ‘They 
first knew Him as ‘‘ the Son of Man.’’ 
Later they realized that He was the ‘‘ Son 
of God.’’ In lke manner men passed 
from the human to the divine element in 
the Scriptures and declared the Bible to 
be the word of God. It is a mistake, I 
think, to demand from men a belief in the 
inspiration of the Bible until they have 
discovered for themselves the divine ele- 
ment in it. They should be permitted to 
grow slowly into belief by contact with 
the book’s spiritual power. Many have 
turned away from the Bible because we 
have asked them to believe in its inspira- 
tion before they have felt its power. Men 
should go to the Bible without preconcep- 
tions as to its authority, and read it sym- 
pathetically as an ordinary book. When 
they have read deeply, and with under- 
standing, they will realize that it has a 
range beyond the reach of unaided man. 
Delving into the human they will break 
through into the divine, and when they 
reach it their hearts will warm within — 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 17 


them, and they will know instinctively that 
it is God who has been talking to them by 
the way. It is this commingling of the 
human with the divine, this incarnation of 
the divine mind in the literature of the 
Jewish race, which gives the Bible its ex- 
traordinary power. Erasmus says in one 
of his letters to Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s 
Cathedral, ‘‘I am rushing at full speed 
into sacred literature, and look at nothing 
which keeps me back from it. I hope now 
I have returned to France to put my af- 
fairs on a slightly better footing. This 
done, I shall sit down to Holy Scripture 
with my whole heart, and devote the rest 
of my life to it.’’ 


The Vision Splendid 

The book enchanted him and gave him 
a new vision of life. ‘‘ Compared with 
Christ,’’ he says, ‘‘ the best of men are 
but worms.’’ ‘‘ Erasmus,’’ Froude says, 
‘¢ had undertaken to give the book to the 
whole world to read for itself the original 
Greek of the Epistles and Gospels, with a 
new Latin translation—to wake up the in- 
telligence, to show that the words had a 
real sense, and were not mere sounds like 


18 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


the dronings of a barrel-organ. It was 
finished at last, text and _ translation 
printed, and the living facts of Christian- 
ity, the persons of Christ and the Apos- 
tles, their history, their lives, their teach- 
ing were revealed to an astonished world. 
For the first time the laity were able to 
see, side by side, the Christianity which 
converted the world, and the Christianity 
of the Church with a Borgia pope, car- 
dinal princes, ecclesiastical courts, and a 
mythology of hes. The effect was to bea 
spiritual earthquake. Never was volume 
more passionately devoured. A hundred 
thousand copies were soon sold in France 
alone. The fire spread, as it spread be- 
hind Samson’s foxes in the Philistines’ 
corn. The words of the Bible have been 
so long familiar to us that we can hardly 
realize what the effect must have been 
when the Gospel was brought out fresh 
and visible before the astonished eyes of 
mankind.’’?’ The publication of the New 
Testament by Erasmus began the Refor- 
mation of Hurope—that mighty uprising 
of intellectual and spiritual forces which 
changed the course of history. About the 
same time, a poor monk in an Augustinian ~ 


THE BOOK OF BOOKS 19 


convent found, in the library, ‘‘ a copy of 
the New Testament lying dusty on the 
shelves. He studied it, digested it, discov- 
ered the extraordinary contrast between 
the Christianity which was taught in the 
Gospels and Epistles and the Christianity 
of the monasteries.’’ 


The Course of History Changed 

The book made Luther a new man and 
sent him out to make a new world. ‘‘ Sud- 
denly,’’ says Froude, ‘‘ as a bolt out of 
the blue, there came a flash of lightning, 
which set the world on fire. A figure now 
steps out upon the scene which has made 
a deeper mark on the history of mankind 
than any one individual man has ever left, 
except Mahomet.’’ With the Bible for a 
torch, Luther set the world on fire and 
burned up much of its dross and super- 
stition. The New Testament of Erasmus 
and the Gospel preaching of Luther set in 
motion spiritual forces that no human 
power could stay or control. In the height 
of this upheaval, Luther resolved to trans- 
late the Bible into the common tongue of 
Germany, so that all his countrymen might 
read it for themselves. Froude says: 


20 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


‘* The names of Luther and Erasmus were 
about to be coupled closer than ever by 
their joint service to mankind. Hrasmus 
had edited the Greek New Testament and 
made a new translation. Luther, in the 
castle of Wartburg, was translating it into 
vernacular German, with the Old Testa- 
ment to follow. Together, these two men. 
had made accessible the rock stronger 
than the rock of Peter, on which the faith 
of mankind was to be rebuilt.’’ Such is 
the verdict of the historian on the effect 
of the rediscovery of the Bible. No other 
book has ever so completely changed the 
course of human destiny. In light and 
power the Bible stands by itself. ‘It bor- 
rows from none and gives to all. Where 
it shines, life and beauty spring to birth. 
It is the supreme book of power. 


IT 


THE BIBLE AS A MEANS 
OF CULTURE 


who died recently, was assistant 

editor of The Outlook. Three of 
his books—Books and Culture, Essays on 
Nature and Culture, and Shakespeare, 
Poet, Dramatist, and Man—are among 
my leading favorites. I would rather go 
barefoot for a week than part with any 
of them, for they are among the most 
illuminating books on life and literature 
that I have read. Others of his are: My 
Study Fire (two series), Under the Trees 
and Elsewhere, Short Studies in Litera- 
ture, and Essays in Literary Interpreta- 
tion. In a chapter—‘‘ The Books of 
Life’’—he says: ‘‘The books of power, 
as distinguished from the books of knowl- 
edge, include the original, creative, first- 


hand books in all lteratures, and consti- 
21 


2 ees WRIGHT MABIR, 


22 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


tute, in the last analysis, a comparatively 
small group, with which any student can 
thoroughly familiarize himself. . . . If 
it be true, as many believe, that the funda- 
mental process of the universe, so far as 
we can understand it, is not intellectual 
but vital, it follows that the deepest 
things which men have learned have come 
to them not as the result of processes of 
thought, but as the result of the process 
of living. . . . Every leading race has its 
characteristic thought concerning its own 
nature, its relation to the world, and the 
character and quality of life. These vari- 
ous fundamental conceptions have shaped 
all definite thinking, and have very largely 
moulded race character, and, therefore, 
determined race destiny. 


_ Hebrew, Greek, and Roman 


‘“‘The Hebrew, the Greek, and the 
Roman conceptions of life constitute not 
only the key to the diverse histories of 
the leaders of ancient civilization, but 
also their most vital contribution to civil- 
ization. These conceptions were not defi- 
nitely thought out; they were worked out. 
They were the result of the contact of 


A MEANS OF CULTURE 23 


these different peoples with Nature, with 
the circumstances of their own time, and 
with those universal experiences which 
fall to the lot of all men, and which are, 
in the long run, the prime sources and in- 
struments of human education. 

The man who would get the ripest enitaye 
from books ought to read many, but there 
are a few books which he must read; 
among them, first and foremost, are the 
Bible, and the works of Homer, Dante, 
Shakespeare, and Goethe. These are the 
supreme books of life as distinguished 
from the books of knowledge and skill. 
They hold their places because they com- 
bine in the highest degree vitality, truth, 
power, and beauty. They are the central 
reservoirs into which the rivulets of indi- 
vidual experience over a vast surface have 
been gathered; they are the most com- 
plete revelations of what life has brought 
and has been to the leading races; they 
bring us into contact with the heart and 
soul of humanity. They not only convey 
information, and, rightly used, impart 
discipline, but they transmit life. There 
is a vitality in them which passes on into 
the nature which is open to receive it. 


24 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


They have again and again inspired intel- 
lectual movements on a wide scale, as 
they are constantly recreating individual 
ideals and aims. 


Agreement About the Infe-giving Power 
of the Bible 


‘‘Whatever view may be held of the. 
authority of the Bible, it is agreed that its 
power as literature has been incalculable 
by reason of the depth of life which it 
sounds and the range of life which it com- 
passes. There is power enough in it to 
revive a decaying age or give a new date 
and a fresh impulse to a race which has 
parted with its creative energy. The re- 
appearance of the New ‘Testament in 
Greek, after the long reign of the Vulgate, 
contributed mightily to that renewal and 
revival of life which we call the Reforma- 
tion; while its translation into the modern 
languages liberated a moral and _ intel- 
lectual force of which no adequate meas- 
urement can be made. In like manner, 
though in lesser degree, the Jlad and 
Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, the plays of 
Shakespeare, and Faust have set new 
movements in motion, and have enriched 


A MEANS OF CULTURE 25 


and enlarged the lives of races. With 
these books of life every man ought to 
hold the most intimate relationship; they 
are not to be read once and put on the 
upper shelves; they are to be always at 
hand. Whoever knows them in a real 
sense knows life, humanity, art, and him- 
self.’ } 

That is what Mabie, a leading lterary 
critic of our time, says about the Bible as 
a means of culture. He places it ‘‘first 
and foremost’’ amongst the supreme 
books of the world. ‘‘There is power 
enough in it to revive a decaying age or 
give a new date and a fresh impulse to a 
race which has parted with its creative 
energy.’’ The England of to-day has 
parted with its creative moral energy. 
That is what lies at the root of all our 
discontent and failure. And every leader 
of men, whether Conservative, Liberal, or 
Socialist, knows it in his lucid moments 
when he sits watching the faces in the 
hearth fire. 


The Fallacy of Inevitable Progress 


The discovery of evolution as a process 
of nature is responsible, I suppose, for 


26 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


the present-day fallacy that human nature 
must inevitably progress with the cen- 
turies from lower to higher types of per- 
sonality and life. It is an application of 
natural law to the spiritual world which 
forgets fundamental differences. In the 
natural world God is not dealing with per- 
sonality, yet, even there, rivers do not al- » 
ways take the nearest way to the sea, but 
sometimes turn back on themselves. In 
human life, however, personality is the 
central fact, and the theory of inevitable 
human progress is, in reality, a denial of 
personality in man—and, more or less, in 
God, for it imagines God as a mighty ir- 
resistible force overriding man’s power 
of choice, and driving him, willy-nilly, to 
a predestined end as a river is driven to 
the sea. If man is a personality, he has 
the power of choice. If he has the power 
of choice he may choose either good or 
evil. If he wishes, he may say to evil, 
‘‘Be thou my good,’’ and resist the divine 
will. Hence the Bible begins with man in 
a beautiful garden where he possesses 
everything that heart could wish. In this 
perfect condition he is tempted of the 
devil, and he chooses, for the time being 


A MEANS OF CULTURE 27 


at any rate, evil as more to be desired 
than good. He is a personality, not a ma- 
chine. The last chapter of the Bible ends 
on the same note: ‘‘He that is unjust, let 
him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, 
let him be filthy still: and he that is right- 
eous, let him be righteous still: and he 
that is holy, let him be holy still.’”? From 
the beginning of the Bible to the end 
there is no overriding of the prerogatives 
of personality. Isaiah, whose religious 
interpretation of history is unequalled, 
when asked, ‘‘Watchman, what of the 
night?’’ replies, ‘‘The morning cometh, 
and also the night.’’ Day and night al- 
ternate. There is ebb and flow, progress 
and ‘‘the putting back of the clock.”’ 
Jesus declares, in no uncertain voice, that 
God will ‘‘avenge his own elect.’’ ‘‘Nev- 
ertheless,’?’ He asks, ‘‘when the Son of 
man cometh, shall he find faith on the 
earth?’’ And He leaves the question un- 
answered. He knows what God will do; 
but what will man choose to do? In 
Christ’s picture of the final judgment of 
the world, men are divided on His right 
hand and on His left. They are sheep 
_and goats, righteous and unrighteous, and 


28 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


they go different ways to different des- 
tinies. There is no suggestion here of an 
‘‘inevitable progress’’ of humanity. Man 
is left free to choose, and some prefer 
darkness to light. The Bible throughout 
pictures God as wrestling with the soul of 
man as He wrestled with Jacob. With 
Jacob God won, but with Judas Jesus lost. — 


The Rise and Fall of Empires 


The issues of the future are uncertain. 
Empires rise and fall. Races progress or 
deteriorate. The English-speaking race 
has progressed during the last two. thou- 
sand years, but the Greeks and Romans 
have degenerated in the same _ period. 
And neither the progress of the first nor 
the degeneracy of the others was inevi- 
table. It was due to moral causes, and all 
morality rests on choice. If culture, for 
such all true progress must be, were a 
matter of mechanical invention, it would 
perhaps be safe to prophesy an inevitable 
development for mankind; but culture is 
an affair of the spirit. A man is not cul- 
tured because he rides in a motor car in- 
stead of on, or behind, a horse. He is 
simply comfortable. Homer had neither 


A MEANS OF CULTURE 29 


a horse nor a motor car, but he was more 
cultured than any man of our time. An 
Atlantic liner is not a sign of the progress 
of culture, it is merely a sign of the de- 
velopment of comfort; and comfort is 
more the result of wealth than of culture. 
In fact, the men who sailed the Atlantic in 
the old sailing vessels derived more cul- 
ture from their voyages than people do 
to-day who cross over in the Mauretania, 
for they were brought into contact with 
the mighty forces of nature. They bat- 
tled with storms and faced death amid the 
loneliness of the high seas. Their wrest- 
ling with nature developed their souls. 
The modern liner has robbed the sea of 
its glory and terror, and a voyage to-day 
enlarges the experience and cultivates the 
soul as little, almost, as a week spent in 
a city hotel. It is the fishermen on our 
coasts who now derive most culture from 
the sea. A train is not a symbol of cul- 
ture. It is merely a symbol of luxury 
and speed. | 


Culture: Ancient and Modern 


The ancient Greeks had no trains, tele- 
phones, steamships, motor cars, or aero- 


30 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


planes, but where to-day is there a race 
so cultured? The modern Greeks with all 
their trains and motor cars are not 
worthy to carry the sandals of the 
Greeks who chiselled La Venus de Milo 
and wrote the Odyssey. Sir Walter Scott 
never saw a typewriter, nor Burns a 
motor car, but where are the Scotsmen of: 
to-day who have reached the same degree 
of culture? Dante, St. Francis of Assisi, 
Raphael, and Michael Angelo never heard 
of a train or aeroplane, but where to-day 
are their equals in the art of living? 
With all our material inventions, can we 
write poetry like Shakespeare, paint pic- 
tures like Rembrandt, or chisel like the 
ancient Greeks? Our inventions pamper 
the body, but do they enlarge the mind 
and elevate the spirit? Are our souls 
greater than the souls which lived cen- 
turies ago? England is infinitely richer 
in material wealth than in the days of old, 
but is it richer in spirit than when Crom- 
well, Milton, and Bunyan were alive; or 
when Shakespeare, Raleigh, Drake, and 
Spenser breathed English air? It is folly 
to suppose, merely because we can all 
read and write in these days, that we are — 


A MEANS OF CULTURE 31 


more cultured than in the days of Shake- 
speare, and have made progress. Read- 
ing and writing are nothing in themselves. 
The question is: What do we read and 
what do we write? The culture of the 
average man in Shakespeare’s time is in- 
dicated by the fact that Shakespeare’s 
great plays were written to meet the 
needs of his time, as our plays are written 
to meet the needs of our time. Shake- 
speare seems to have thought far less 
about publication than our modern play- 
wrights, and to have troubled himself less 
about giving posterity a chance to read 
his works—the sonnets apart. 


Running Away From LInfe 


The Elizabethans sought experience. 
We try to escape experience. We have 
drugs for the body and cinemas and light 
novels for the mind. The majority of the 
people in Milton’s days fed themselves on 
the Bible—the greatest literature in the 
world. The majority of the people to-day 
feed themselves on newspapers, maga- 
zines, and poor fiction. Our fathers won 
for us freedom of speech, and we have no 
use for our liberty—no great convictions 


32. THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


to utter. They won for us the right to 
worship God according to our own con- 
science, and the right is of no value to us, 
because, except for a minority, we have 
no desire to worship God either in one 
way or in another. Our fathers won for 
us civil rights and liberties, and forty out 
of every hundred of us do not even. 
trouble to vote. Whether the white races 
will progress or degenerate depends on 
individual and national choice. Neither 
progress nor decay is inevitable. That 
we still have the capacity for greatness 
was shown not by the War but in the 
War. The fine qualities revealed. during 
that terrible struggle, rightly guided and 
fostered, may lead on to an age more 
glorious than any in the past. To pro- 
gress we must dare to live. We must 
stand up to life. We must seek, and not 
shun, experience. We must read, and live 
in the spirit of great books; for they hold 
all that was most vital in the great days 
of old. And of all great books, the com- 
mon sense of mankind has declared the 
Bible to be the supreme guide in the art 
of living. 


Til 


THE CREATIVE POWER OF 
THE BIBLE 


quoted Hamilton Wright Mabie’s 

judgment of the Bible, that ‘‘there 
is power enough in it to revive a decaying 
age or give a new date and a fresh im- 
pulse to a race which has parted with its 
creative energy.’’ That this is not an ex- 
aggeration I want to prove from the his- 
tory of England. The Bible actually did, 
three hundred years ago, ‘‘revive a decay- 
ing age and give a new date and a fresh 
impulse to our race when it had parted 
with its creative energy.’’ Buy John 
Richard Green’s. standard work, the 
Short History of the English People. On 
the first page of the second half this is 
what you read: ‘‘No greater moral 
change ever passed over a nation than 


passed over England during the years 
33 


ew in the previous chapter, 


34 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


which parted the middle of the reign of 
Hlizabeth from the meeting of the Long 
Parliament. England became the people 
of a ‘book, and that book was the Bible. 
It was as yet the one English book which 
was familiar to every Englishman: it was 
read at churches and read at home, and 
everywhere its words, as they fell on ears 
which custom had not deadened to their 
force and beauty, kindled a startling en- 
thusiasm. When Bishop Bonner set up 
the first six Bibles in St. Paul’s ‘many 
well-disposed people used much to resort 
to the hearing thereof, especially when 
they could get any that had an. audible 
voice to read to them. One John Porter 
used sometimes to be occupied in that 
goodly exercise to the edifying of himself 
as well as others. This Porter was a 
fresh young man and of a big stature; 
and great multitudes would resort thither 
to hear him, because he could read well 
and had an audible voice.’ 


Popularity of the Bible 
‘‘The popularity of the Bible was owing 
to other causes besides that of religion. . 
The whole prose literature of HKngland, 


CREATIVE POWER 35 


save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has 
grown up since the translation of the 
Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. 
No history, no romance, no poetry, save 
the little known verse of Chaucer, existed 
for any practieal purpose in the English 
tongue when the Bible was ordered to be 
set up in churches. Sunday after Sun- 
day, day after day, the crowds that gath- 
ered round Bonner’s Bibles in the nave 
of St. Paul’s, or the family group that 
hung on the words of the Geneva Bible in 
the devotional exercises at home, were 
leavened with a new literature. Legends 
and annals, war song and psalm, State 
rolls and biographies, the mighty voices 
of prophets, the parables of evangelists, 
stories of mission journeys, of perils by 
the sea, and among the heathen, philoso- 
phic arguments, apocalyptic visions—all 
were flung broadcast over minds unoccu- 
pied for the most part by any rival learn- 
ing. The disclosure of the stories of 
Greek literature had wrought the revolu- 
tion of the Renaissance. The disclosure 
of the older mass of Hebrew literature 
wrought the revolution of the Reforma- 
tion. But the one revolution was far 


36 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


deeper and wider in its effects than the 
other. No version could transfer to an- 
other tongue the peculiar charm of lan- 
guage which gave their value to the au- 
thors of Greece and Rome. : 


“The Noblest Example of the English 
Tongue”’ 


‘‘Classical letters, therefore, remained 
in the possession of the learned, that is of 
the few; and among these, with the ex- 
ception of Colet and More, or of the 
pedants. who revived a Pagan worship in 
the gardens of the Florentine Academy, 
their direct influence was purely intel- 
lectual. But the tongue of the Hebrew, 
the idiom of Hellenistic Greek, lent them- 
selves with a curious felicity to the pur- 
poses of translation. As a mere literary 
monument, the English version of the 
Bible remains the noblest example of the 
English tongue. Its perpetual use made 
it from the instant of its appearance the 
standard of our language. But for the 
moment its literary effect was less than 
its social. The power of the book over the 
mass of Englishmen showed itself in a 
thousand superficial ways, and in none 


CREATIVE POWER 3t 


more conspicuously than in the influence 
it exerted on ordinary speech. The mass 
of picturesque allusion and _ illustration 
which we borrow from a thousand books 
our fathers were forced to borrow from 
one; and the borrowing was the easier and 
the more natural that the range of the He- 
brew literature fitted it for the expression 
of every phase of feeling. When Spenser 
poured forth his warmest love notes in 
the Eypithalamion, he adopted the very 
words of the Psalmist as he bade the 
gates open for the entrance of his bride. 


Cromwell’s Battle Cry 


‘“When Cromwell saw the mists break 
over the hills of Dunbar, he hailed the 
sunburst with the ery of David: ‘Let God 
arise, and let His enemies be scattered. 
Like as the sun riseth, so shalt thou drive 
them away.’ Even to common minds this 
familiarity with grand poetic imagery in 
prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness 
and ardor of expression, that with all its 
tendency to exaggeration and bombast we 
may prefer to the slipshod vulgarisms of 
the shopkeeper of to-day. 

, “*But far greater than its effect on 


38 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


literature or social phrase was the effect 
of the Bible on the character of the peo- 
ple at large. Elizabeth might silence or 
tune the pulpits; but it was impossible for 
her to silence or tune the great preachers 
of justice, and mercy, and truth, who 
spoke from the book which she had again 
opened for her people. The whole moral 
effect which is produced nowadays by the 
religious newspaper, the tract, the essay, 
the lecture, the missionary report, the ser- 
mon, was then produced by the Bible 
alone. And its effect in this way, however 
dispassionately we examine it, was simply 
amazing. ‘he whole temper of the nation 
was changed. 


The First Democracy 


‘“A new conception of life and of man 
superseded the old. A new moral and 
religious impulse spread through every 
class. Literature reflected the general 
tendency of the time. ‘Theology rules 
there,’ said Grotius of England. The 
study of the country gentleman pointed 
towards theology as much as the scholar. 
The whole nation became, in fact, a 
Church. We must not, indeed, picture the 


CREATIVE POWER 39 


early Puritan as a gloomy fanatic. The 
lighter and more elegant sides of the 
Elizabethan culture harmonized _ well 
enough with the temper of the Puritan 
gentleman. Serious as was his temper in 
graver matters, the young squire was 
fond of hawking, and piqued himself on 
his skill in dancing and fence. If he was 
‘diligent in his examination of the Scrip- 
tures,’ he ‘had a great love for music, and 
often diverted himself with the viol.’ A 
taste for music, indeed, seems to have 
been common in the graver homes of the 
time. 

‘‘Their common call, their common 
brotherhood in Christ, annihilated in the 
mind of the Puritans that overpowering 
sense of social distinctions which charac- 
terized the age of Elizabeth. The mean- 
est peasant felt himself ennobled as a 
child of God. The proudest noble recog- 
nized a spiritual equality in the poorest 
saint.’’ 


The Secret of Greatness 


Mr. J. L. Paton, a well-known educa- 
tionalist, says: ‘‘If men read trash they 


40 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


think trash, and if they think trash they 
become trash.’’?’ The English people in 
the reign of Elizabeth did not read trash. 
They read a great book—the book. There- 
fore, they thought great thoughts and be- 
came a great people. The rise of the 
English dates from that period. As coal 
feeds a fire the Bible has fed the spirit of - 
our race. The foundations of the United 
States were laid by Bible readers—the 
Pilgrim Fathers. And to-day there is a 
British Commonwealth of Nations and a 
great English-speaking Republic, which, 
together, dominate the world. How? By 
the sword? No! By cleverness? No! 
They dominate by the force of character, 
and their character has been built up by 
three centuries of close communion with 
the great thoughts and principles of the 
Bible. The civilization and Christianiza- 
tion of the world depend to-day upon 
America and the British Commonwealth 
of Nations—English-speaking peoples who 
have risen to greatness through contact 
with the mighty spirit which surges 
through the Bible. 


CREATIVE POWER 41 


The Fall of Germany 


We have seen the German nation rise 
to greatness through the Bible-teaching 
of the Reformation, and then fall into 
ruin by turning away from the Bible 
to Nietzsche and accepting ‘‘Darwin’s 
science of the animal efficient in its own 
interest’’ as ‘‘the science of civilization 
itself.’? Nietzsche parodied the Sermon 
on the Mount, and taught its opposite. 
To quote Benjamin Kidd, ‘‘ Nietzsche 
gave Germany the doctrine of Darwin’s 
efficient animal in the voice of his super- 
man. Bernhardi and the military text- 
books in due time gave Germany the doc- 
trine of the superman translated into the 
national policy of the superstate aiming 
at world power.’’ The religious interpre- 
tation of history as contained in the Bible 
was rejected, and Darwin’s scientific in- 
terpretation of the history of animal life 
was applied to the things of the soul. In- 
stead of walking humbly with their God 
as the Bible teaches, the Germans loved to 
shout: ‘‘Life exists for Me. All the dim 
eons behind have toiled to produce Me. 
I am the Fittest. Give Me My Rights. 


42 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


Stand clear of My way. I want and I will 
have.’’? Like Nebuchadnezzar, they lifted 
up their pride to the heavens and fell into 
the abyss. For nations, as for individ- 
uals, there is only one absolutely safe 
guide-book here below, and that is the 
Bible. I am convinced that the rise of 
the English was due to the regenerating | 
power of the Bible, which they read and 
absorbed; that there will be no racial de- 
cay while we give it the place in our lives 
which our fathers gave it, but that any 
serious decline in Bible reading and the 
influence of Bible principles will be fol- 
lowed by the decline and fall of the Eng- 
lish-speaking peoples. 


IV 


THE INSPIRING EFFECT OF THE 
BIBLE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 


‘T= Bible has done more to create 
Kinglish literature than any other 
book. Before it was translated 
into English, England had practically no 
prose writings and little poetry. After it, 
came Shakespeare (who alludes to it con- 
stantly), John Milton, John Bunyan, and 
a host of others. Its influence is directly 
visible in nearly all our great writers 
down to the present day. It is acknowl- 
edged by all literary men to be ‘‘the well 
of English undefiled.’’ It is the standard 
of English speech and writing; and the 
book, above all others, in which a youth 
ought to steep himself if he ever wishes 
to write the best English. It created in 
England that great spirit among the peo- 
ple out of which great literature has its 


rise. For supreme writers like Shake- 
43 


44 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


speare are not isolated from their fellows, 
but are the fine flower and most perfect 
expression of the spirit of their age. 


Why Men Are Great 


They stand on the shoulders of their 
countrymen, and are great because their 
age is great, and pours its spirit through 
them. We see the same law at work in 
the rise of Greek literature and art, and 
in the development of the great painting 
age in Italy. The Bible created a new 
spirit in England. Froude, the historian, 
attributes the greatness of the sailors in 
the time of Drake and the Armada to the 
fact that they were mostly Protestants 
brought up on the Bible. And historians 
are agreed that the greatness of Crom- 
well’s soldiers was due to the religious 
convictions and increased sense of per- 
sonal worth inspired in them by the Bible. 
Great thoughts and great acts alike spring 
from a great spirit, and this great spirit 
came through the nation’s vital contact 
with the Bible. The uplifting influence of 
the Bible was perhaps most marked in 
Milton’s time, for the whole nation was 
feeding its soul on it. And this is what 


EFFECT ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 45 


he says of the spirit of the age in his 
Areopagitica: ‘‘ Methinks I see in my mind 
a noble and puissant nation rousing her- 
self like a strong man after sleep, and 
shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I 
see her as an eagle mewing her mighty 
youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at 
the full mid-day beam: purging and un- 
scaling her long-abused sight at the foun- 
tain itself of heavenly radiance; while the 
whole noise of timorous and flocking 
birds, with those also that love the twi- 
light, flutter about, amazed at what she 
means, and in their envious gabble would 
prognosticate a year of sects and schisms. 
What should ye do, then? Should ye sup- 
press all this flowery crop of knowledge 
and new light sprung up, and yet spring- 
ing daily, in this city? Should ye set an 
oligarchy of twenty engrossers over it, to 
bring a famine upon our minds again, 
when we shall know nothing but what is 
measured to us by their bushel?’’ 


The New Light 
Such was the light and new spirit that 
the Bible had brought to England. It was 
the translation of the Bible that ‘‘roused 


46 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


the strong man after sleep.’’ It was 
in the truths the Bible had brought to 
light that the eagle was ‘‘kindling her un- 
dazzled eyes, and purging and unsealing 
her long-abused sight at the fountain it- 
self of heavenly radiance.’’ There is no 
Milton in the land to-day, because there is 
no light and spirit in the nation such as 
he describes, and great poets can live only 
in great communities. It was the newly 
translated Bible that made the England 
of Milton great. Speaking of England, 
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Professor of 
English Literature at Cambridge, says: 
‘‘For three centuries or so it has held 
rule over vast stretches of the earth’s sur- 
face and many millions of strange peo- 
ples.’’ ‘‘For three centuries or so!’’ 


What Happened Three Centuries Ago 


What happened ‘‘three centuries or 
so’? ago? This: In 1535 ‘‘there appeared 
the first copy of the English Bible.’”’ (1 
am quoting from Froude’s History of 
England.) ‘‘In this act was laid the 
foundation-stone on which the whole later 
history of England, civil as well as ecclesi- 
astical, has been reared; and the most — 


EFFECT ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 47 


minute incidents became interesting, con- 
nected with an event of so mighty mo- 
ment.’’ That was 388 years ago, when 
Shakespeare was 29. Fifty years later 
(from 1583 to 1603, especially) the Bible 
was spreading into every home, and 
crowds were gathering in St. Paul’s to 
hear it read. In 1611 the Authorized Ver- 
sion of the Bible was issued. That is a 
little over three hundred years ago. In 
1599 Cromwell was born; Milton in 1608; 
and Bunyan in 1628. All three were born 
and nurtured in an England filled with the 
light and fire of the Bible, and they be- 
eame the very expression of the spirit of 
their time. Milton’s mind was dyed 
through with the Bible, as we see in 
Paradise Lost and in all his prose works. 
He is the organ voice of England, and 
stands but a little below Shakespeare. 
Wordsworth says of him: 


Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; 
England hath need of thee. . 

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart; 

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea; 
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 

So didst thou travel on life’s common way 

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 

The lowliest duties on herself did lay. 


48 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


That was the kind of poet a Bible-loving 
age produced. 


Poetry—and Faith 


But what poet can this secularistic 
half-believing age produce? Milton is su- 
preme in the English language as a writer 
of the sublime style; and Bunyan, who be- | 
longed to the same age, is supreme in the 
simple style. And both are the children 
of the revolution produced by the transla- 
tion of the Bible. Quiller-Couch, in On 
the Art of Reading, says: ‘‘ Masterpieces 
will serve us as prophylactics of taste, 
even from childhood; and will help us, 
further, to interpret the common mind of 
civilization. But they have a third and 
yet nobler use. They teach us to lift our 
own souls. . « . The real battle for 
Kinglish lies in our elementary schools, 
and in the learning of our elementary 
teachers. It is there that the foundation 
of a sound national teaching in English 
will have to be laid, as it is there that a 
wrong trend will lead to incurable issues. 
For the poor child has no choice of 
schools.’’ The Bible as the masterpiece 
of the English language should be taught 


EFFECT ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 49 


to every child; for, to quote again John 
Richard Green, ‘‘The English Version of 
the Bible remains the noblest example of 
the English tongue—the standard of our 
language.’’ 


Vv 
BUNYAN AND THE BIBLE 


OCKHART, in his biography of 
Sir Walter Scott, tells how in his 

last hours he ‘‘desired to be drawn 
into the library, and placed by the central 
window, that he might look upon the 
Tweed. Here he expressed a wish that I 
should read to him, and when I asked 
from what book, he said: ‘Need you ask? 
There is but one.’’’ What Sir Walter 
Scott did not know about literature was 
not worth knowing; and his last testimony 
was that there is but one supreme book, 
and that is the Bible. Out of that book 
has come most of our great H!nglish litera- 
ture. If we had never known the Bible, 
our literature would have been of an en- 
tirely different kind. Perhaps its direct 
effect is most marked in Bunyan. The 
Bible dyed Milton’s mind through and 


through, as his works show, but the clas- 
50 


BUNYAN AND THE BIBLE 51 


sics of Rome and Greece mixed their col- 
ors with it. But Bunyan was a poor 
tinker, and knew no other book. He was 
literally ‘‘a man of one book.’’ But this 
book was a library in itself, and made him 
the greatest writer of simple English in 
our language. Robert Blatchford, the ag- 
nostic, is one of the best writers of simple 
English in our own time, and it was his 
style that made him such a power in the 
land twenty years ago. Had his matter 
been equal to his style, he would have re- 
tained his influence, and become one of the 
immortals; but he was handicapped in 
youth, and had little chance to study 
deeply until he left the army. 


Where Men Learn to Write 


Where did he get his style? Was it 
from the Rationalist Press? No, no one 
ever got it there. He got it where all must 
get it who wish to write sweet, simple, 
beautiful, nervous English. He got it 
from John Bunyan, the Bible, and the 
Church of England Prayer Book. The 
Litany in the Prayer Book especially ap- 
peals to him—as it must to all who have 
any taste at all in English—and he places 


52 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


‘‘ Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solo- 
mon,’’ from the Bible, among his favorite 
‘‘bed books.’’ But it is Bunyan who, more 
than anyone else, has given him his sim- 
ple and limpid style. He says, in My 
Favorite Books, ‘‘I fear I cannot ap- 
proach the Pilgrim’s Progress with the 
same critical calm with which J ap- | 
proached Urn Burial. I was turned of 
forty years, and somewhat of a writer and 
student myself, when Sir Thomas Browne 
was introduced to me, but Bunyan was the 
friend and teacher of my childhood; the 
Pilgrim’s Progress was my first book. It 
was for me one of the books to be ‘chewed 
and digested,’ and in my tenth year 8 
knew it almost all by heart. 

‘‘T used at times, when the baby was 
restless, to ride it upon my knee, and re- 
cite to it passages out of Bunyan, or sing 
to it the verses—they are but feeble 
poetry—from that wonderful book, to 
tunes of my own composing. 

‘‘Criticism of Bunyan’s work is rete 
me. I might as well try to criticize the 
Lord’s Prayer, or ‘The House that Jack 
Built,’ or ‘Annie Laurie.’ Bunyan’s Eng- 
lish is tinker’s, and soldier’s, and preach- 


BUNYAN AND THE BIBLE 53 


er’s English. It is the English of the 
Bible, of the Ironsides, and of the village 
green. Therefore, all who write for the 
people shall do well to study Bunyan.”’ 


Lord Macaulay on Bunyan 


In this Blatchford had practised what 
he preached. Macaulay, in his essay on 
Bunyan, says: ‘‘ We are not afraid to say, 
that though there were many clever men 
in England during the latter half of the 
seventeenth century, there were only two 
minds (both Puritans) which possessed 
the imaginative faculty in a very eminent 
degree. One of these minds produced the 
Paradise Lost, the other the Pilgrim’s 
Progress. The style of Bunyan is delight- 
ful to every reader, and invaluable as a 
study to every person who wishes to ob- 
tain a wide command over the English lan- 
guage. The vocabulary is the vocabulary 
of the common people. . . . Yet no 
writer has said more exactly what he 
meant to say. For magnificence, for 
pathos, for vehement exhortation, for sub- 
tle disquisition, for every purpose of the 
poet, the orator, and the divine, this 
homely dialect, the dialect of plain work- 


54 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


ing men, was perfectly sufficient. There 
is no book in our literature on which we 
would so readily stake the fame of the old 
unpolluted English language, no book 
which shows so well how rich that lan- 
guage is in its own proper wealth, and 
how little it has been improved by all that 
it has borrowed.’’ Dr. Johnson and Rob- — 
ert Louis Stevenson had like praise for 
Bunyan. 


Where Bunyan Got His Style 


Now where did Bunyan get his wonder- 
ful style? How came an illiterate tinker 
of three hundred years ago to write an — 
English masterpiece that has been ‘trans- 
lated into nearly every language in the 
world? I have no hesitation in saying 
that, but for the English Version of the 
Bible, Bunyan would never have written 
a single word in our literature. Bunyan 
says, in Grace Abounding: ‘‘I fell into 
company with one poor man, who, as [ 
thought, did talk pleasantly of the Scrip- 
tures and of Religion; wherefore, liking 
what he said, I betook me to my Bible, and 
began to take great pleasure in reading, 
especially with the historical part thereof; 


BUNYAN AND THE BIBLE 55 


for as for Paul’s Epistles and such-like 
scriptures, I could not away with them.”’ 
A few pages further on he says—and the 
change in taste is instructive—‘‘And now 
I began to look into the Bible with new 
eyes; and especially the Epistles of the 
Apostle St. Paul were sweet and pleasant 
to me.’’ It was this reading that made 
Bunyan an author. He himself says: 
‘‘My Bible and Concordance are my only 
library in my writings.”’ 


Green and Hallam on Bunyan’s Bible 
| English 

Green, in his Short History of England, 
says of Pilgrim’s Progess: ‘‘In no book 
do we see more clearly the new imagina- 
tive force which had been given to the 
common life of Englishmen by their study 
of the Bible. Its English is the simplest 
and homeliest English which has ever been 
used by any great English writer; but it 
is the English of the Bible. So completely 
has the Bible become Bunyan’s life, that 
one feels its phrases as the natural ex- 
pression of his thoughts. He has lived in 
the Bible till its words have become his 
own.’’ Hallam, another historian, says: 


56 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


‘“‘There is scarcely a circumstance or 
metaphor in the Old Testament which 
does not find a place bodily and literally 
in the Pilgrim’s Progress, and this has 
made Bunyan’s imagination appear more 
creative than it really is.’’ Coleridge said 
that the Pilgrim’s Progress was ‘‘incom- 
parably the best compendium of Gospel 
truth ever produced by a writer not mi- — 
raculously inspired.’? ‘The Bible made 
Bunyan; and it has moulded all literature 
since his time. It is the voice of God 


Who at sundry times, in manners many 
Spake to the fathers, and is speaking still. 


VI 
HEINE AND THE BIBLE 


EINE was a philosopher of such 
H originality of thought and out- 

spokenness of speech that almost 
all his writings were mutilated by the Ger- 
man censor. He was also ‘‘the first in 
rank and the last in time of the Romantic 
poets of Germany.’’ In the Preface to the 
second edition of Religion and Philosophy 
in Germany, one of his most important 
works, he says: ‘‘At that time (when the 
book was first published) I was yet well 
and hearty; I was in the zenith of my 
prime, and as arrogant as Nebuchadnezzar 
before his downfall. Alas! a few years 
later, a physical and spiritual change oc- 
eurred. How often since then have I 
mused over the history of that Babylonian 
king who thought himself a god, but who 
was miserably hurled from the summit of 


his self-conceit, and compelled to crawl on 
57 


58 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


the earth like a beast, and to eat grass 
(probably it was only salad). This legend 
is contained in the grand and magnificent 
Book of Daniel; and I recommend all god- 
less, self-worshippers to lay it devoutly to 
heart. There are, in fact, in the Bible 
many other beautiful and wonderful nar- 
rations, well deserving their considera- 
tion; for instance, the story of the forbid- 
den fruit in Paradise, and the serpent 
which already six thousand years before 
Hegel’s birth promulgated the whole 
Hegelian philosophy. 


The ‘‘Plain Old Book’’ 


‘‘T owe my enlightenment simply to the 
reading of a book! One book! Yes, it is 
a plain old book, as modest as nature, and 
as simple; a book that appears as work- 
day-like and as unpretentious as the sun 
that warms, as the bread that nourishes 
us; a book that looks on us as kindly and 
benignly as an old grandmother, who, with 
her dear tremulous lips, and spectacles on 
nose, reads in it daily: this book is briefly 
called the book—the Bible. With good 
reason it is also called the Holy Scrip- 
tures: he that has lost his God can find 


HEINE AND THE BIBLE 59 


Him again in this book, and towards him 
who has never known Him it wafts the 
breath of the divine word. The Jews who 
are connoisseurs of precious things, well 
knew what they were about when, at the 
- burning of the second temple, they left in 
the lurch the gold and silver sacrificial 
vessels, the candlesticks and lamps, and 
even the richly jewelled breast-plate of 
the high-priest, to rescue only the Bible.’’ 
Later, Heine calls the Bible, ‘‘this holiest 
book of humanity.’’ From 1848 to his 
death in 1856 Heine was the victim of a 
painful paralysis which kept him to his 
‘‘mattress-grave.’’ ‘‘ He lay,’’ says an 
English visitor in 1855, ‘‘on a pile of mat- 
tresses, his body wasted so that it seemed 
no bigger than a child under the sheet 
which covered him—his eyes closed, and 
the face altogether like the most painful 
and wasted ‘Ecce Homo’ ever painted by 
some old German painter.’’ In these pain- 
ful circumstances he wrote: ‘‘Alas! fame 
once sweet as sugared pineapple and flat- 
tery, has for a long time been nauseous te 
me; it tastes as bitter to me now as worm- 
wood. What does it avail me that at ban- 
quets my health is pledged in the choicest 


60 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


wines and drunk from golden goblets, 
when I, myself, severed from all that 
makes life pleasant, may only wet my lips 
with an insipid potion? What does it 
avail me that enthusiastic youths and 
maidens crown my marble bust with 
laurel-wreaths, if meanwhile the shriv- 
elled fingers of an aged nurse press a blis- 
ter of Spanish flies behind the ears of my 
actual body? 


“The Aristophanes of Heaven’’ 


‘‘Alas! the irony of God weighs heavily 
upon me! the great Author of the uni- 
verse, the Aristophanes of Heaven, wished 
to show the petty, earthly, so-called Ger- 
man Aristophanes that his mightiest sar- 
casms are but feeble banter compared with 
His, and how immeasurably he excels me 
in humor and in colossal wit.’’? He had at 
this time been kept to his bed for six 
years. ‘‘He went out for the last time,’’ 
says Havelock Ellis, ‘‘in May, 1848. Half 
blind and half lame, he slowly made his 
way out of the streets, filled with the noise 
of revolution, into the silent Louvre, to the 
shrine dedicated to ‘the goddess of beauty, 
our dear lady of Milo.’ There he sat long 


HEINE AND THE BIBLE 61 


at her feet; he was bidding farewell to his 
old gods; he had become reconciled to the 
religion of sorrow; tears streamed from 
his eyes, and she looked down at him, com- 
passionate but helpless: ‘Dost thou not 
see, then, that I have no arms, and cannot 
help thee?’ ’’ During the weary years that 
followed he seems to have drawn real com- 
fort from the Bible, for, five years after 
his pathetic farewell to La Venus de Milo, 
he writes from his ‘‘mattress-grave’’: 
‘“You see that I, who in the past was wont 
to quote Homer, now quote the Bible, like 
Uncle Tom. In truth I owe it much. It 
again awoke in me the religious feeling; 
and this new birth of religious emotion 
suffices for the poet, for he can dispense 
far more easily than other mortals with 
positive religious dogmas. 


The Failure of Philosophies 


‘‘It is strange! during my whole life I 
have been strolling through the various 
festive halls of philosophy, I have partici- 
pated in all the orgies of the intellect, I 
have coquetted with every possible sys- 
tem, without being satisfied; and now, 
after all this, I suddenly find myself on 


62 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


the same platform whereon stands Uncle 
Tom. That platform is the Bible, and I 
kneel by the side of my dusky brother in 
faith with the same devotion. What hu- 
miliation! With all my learning, I have 
got no farther than the poor ignorant 
negro who can hardly spell! It is even 
true that poor Uncle Tom appears to see 
in the holy book more profound things 
than I, who am not yet quite clear, espe- 
cially in regard to the second part.’’ 
Later on, in his Confessions, Heine says: 
‘*At an earlier period when philosophy 
possessed for me a paramount interest, I 
prized Protestantism only for its services 
in winning freedom of thought. Now, in 
my later and more mature days, when the 
religious feeling again surges up in me, 
and the shipwrecked metaphysician clings 
fast to the Bible—now I chiefly honor 
Protestantism for its services in the dis- 
covery and propagation of the Bible. The 
Jews rescued the Bible from the bank- 
ruptey of the Roman empire, and pre- 
served the precious volume intact during 
all the tumults of the migration of races, 
until Protestantism came to seek it and 
translated it into the language of the land © 


HEINE AND THE BIBLE 63 


and spread it broadcast over the whole 
world. 


‘““The Kingdom of the Syrit’’ 


‘‘This extensive circulation of the Bible 
has produced the most beneficent fruits, 
and continues to do so to this very day. 

While by tricks of trade, smug- 
gling, and commerce the British gain foot- 
holds in many lands, with them they bring 
the Bible, that grand democracy wherein 
each man shall not only be king in his own 
house, but also bishop. They are demand- 
ing, they are founding, the great kingdom 
of the spirit, the kingdom of the religious 
emotions, and the love of humanity, of 
purity, of true morality, which cannot be 
taught by dogmatic formulas, but by par- 
able and example, such as are contained in 
that beautiful, sacred, educational book 
for young and old—the Bible.’’ 


Vil | 
THE BIBLE AND LITERARY STYLE 


KINE, in his Religion and Philoso- | 
H phy of Germany, says: “‘I have 

said that we gained freedom of 
thought through Luther. But he gave us 
not only freedom of movement, but also 
the means of movement; to the thought he 
gave words. He created the German lan- 
guage. This he did by his translation of 
the Bible. In fact, the Divine author of 
that book seems to have known, as well as 
we others, that the choice of a translator 
is by no means a matter of indifference; 
and so He Himself selected His translator, 
and bestowed on him the wonderful gift 
to translate from a language which was 
dead and already buried, into another lan- 
guage that as yet did not exist. Luther’s 
Bible is an enduring spring of rejuvena- 
tion for our language. All the expres- 


sions and phrases contained therein are 
64 


THE BIBLE AND LITERARY STYLE 65 


German, and are still in use by writers. 
As this book is in the hands of even the 
poorest people, they require no special 
learned education in order to be able to 
express themselves in literary forms.’’ It 
has been the work of the Bible to do for 
many races what it has done for the Ger- 
mans. Wherever the missionary goes he 
translates the Bible into the native lan- 
guage, and often it is the first book the 
race possesses in its own tongue. It thus 
becomes the standard of the language. 
When the book is printed the missionary 
teaches the people to read it, and the edu- 
cation of the race begins. 


The Bible a Portable University 


The Bible is to them a portable univer- 
sity. Later on, as a result of this educa- 
tion by the Bible, schools and colleges will 
be built, and a national literature will 
slowly come into existence. What Luther 
did for Germany by means of the Bible, 
the missionaries of to-day are doing for 
native races in all the lands where they 
labor. What happened in Germany, hap- 
pened also in England. The historian, 
J. R. Green, says: ‘‘As a mere literary 


66 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


monument, the English Version of the 
Bible remains the noblest example of the 
English tongue. Its perpetual use made 
it from the instant of its appearance the 
standard of our language.’’ Heine’s de- 
scription of the effect of Luther’s Bible 
on the German language may be used, 
without the alteration of a word, to de- 
scribe the effect of the English Bible on- 
the English language. For centuries the 
Bible was the only school the working peo- 
ple of England possessed. Its influence 
alone made Bunyan, the Bedford tinker, 
a master in English literature. And to 
it, as ‘‘the noblest example of the English 
tongue’’ our poets and writers have ever 
turned. The works of all our greatest 
writers, from Spenser to the present day, 
bear its imprint, as all who know the Bible 
may see for themselves. Burns declared 
that he never heard the words ‘‘Let us 
worship God’’ without a feeling of awe 
overtaking him, for they reminded him of 
the daily act of worship conducted by 
his father in the home. In The Cotter’s 
Saturday Night he describes a_ scene 
which took place regularly in his own cot- 


THE BIBLE AND LITERARY STYLE 67 


tage and in scores of thousands through- 
out Seotland and England. 


The cheerfu’ supper done, wi’ serious face, 
They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; 
The sire turns o’er, wi’ patriarchal grace, 
The big ha’ Bible, once his father’s pride: 
His bonnet rev’rently is laid aside, 
His lyart haffets wearing thin an’ bare: 
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, 
He wales a portion with judicious care; 
And “‘ Let us worship God! ” he says with solemn air. 


The priest-like father reads the sacred page, 
How Abram was the friend of God on high; 
Or, Moses bade eternal warfare wage, 
With Amalek’s ungracious progeny! 
Or how the royal bard did groaning lie 
Beneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging ire; 
Or, Job’s pathetic plaint, and wailing ery; 
Or rapt Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire; 

Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre. 


Perhaps the Christian volume is the theme, 

How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed; 

How He, who bore in Heaven the second name, 
Had not on earth whereon to lay His head; 

How His first followers and servants sped, 

The precepts sage they wrote to many a land; 

How he, who lone in Patmos banishéd, 

Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand; 

And heard great Bab’lon’s doom pronounced by Heaven’s 
command. 


The Bible the Nursing Mother of Poets 


Were it not that the minds of the Scot- 
tish peasants, generation after generation, 
had been saturated with the Bible—‘‘the 


68 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


standard of our language,’’ it may well be 
doubted whether Burns would have found 
it possible to express the poetry that was 
in him. But, ‘‘as this book,’’ again to 
quote Heine, ‘‘is in the hands of even the 
poorest people, they require no special 
learned education in order to be able to 
express themselves in literary forms.’’ It 
is true that, since the days of Knox, Scot- 
land has had a superior educational sys- 
tem and that all her sons have been given 
a chance to enter on the path of learning; 
but, as the educational system sprang 
from the Reformation, so the Reformation 
sprang from the re-discovery and DEEP Sg 
gation of the Bible. 

The Bible, as the nursing mother of 
poets, is clearly seen in the life of James 
Hogg. Rowland EK. Prothero says, in The 
Psalms in Human Infe: ‘‘On the Psalms, 
as his mother repeated them to him in the 
metrical version of Scotland, James Hogg, 
the Ettrick Shepherd, nursed his childish 
imagination, and mingled with them her 
tales of giants, kelpies, brownies, and 
other aerial creations of the fairy world. 
Before he knew his letters he could say 
Psalm 122, and, as he grew older, he 


THE BIBLE AND LITERARY STYLE 69 


learned by heart the greater part of the 
Psalter. The Bible was, in fact, the herd- 
boy’s only book.’’ The writer says: ‘‘Of 
Walter Scott’s familiarity with the Psalms 
his novels give abundant evidence, and 
scraps of the Psalms were among the last 
words which his friends could distinguish 
from his lips.’’ 


Byron and the Bible 


That Byron, ‘‘half a Scot by birth,’’ was 
familiar with the Bible, we see from the 
Hebrew Melodies written during his 
honeymoon, and by many passages in his 
poems. Despite his waywardness, he 
gained from his nurse a love and knowl- 
edge of the Bible, which never forsook 
him. While still a boy, he committed to 
memory many of the Psalms, the 1st and 
23rd among others. Ruskin, who, in his 
earlier days, took Byron as a master of 
style, speaks of the Bible, as ‘‘the library 
of Kurope, for that, observe, is the real 
meaning, in its first power, of the word 
Bible. Not book, merely; but ‘Biblio- 
theca,’ Treasury of Books.’’ In Prae- 
terita Ruskin tells how his early familiar- 
ity with the Bible preserved his literary 


70 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


taste from deterioration and his style 
from becoming superficial and formal. 
He says: ‘‘Walter Scott and Pope’s 
Homer were reading of my own elec- 
tion, but my mother forced me, by steady 
daily toil, to learn long chapters of the 
Bible by heart; as well as to read it every 
syllable through, aloud, hard names and 
all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about 
once a year: and to that discipline—pa- - 
tient, accurate, and resolute—I owe, not 
only a knowledge of the book, which I find 
occasionally serviceable, but much of my 
general power of taking pains, and the 
best part of my taste in literature. 


The Bible, Ruskin’s Standard of 
Interary Taste : 

‘rom Walter Scott’s novels I might 
easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other 
people’s novels; and Pope might, perhaps, 
have led me to take Johnson’s English, or 
Gibbon’s, as types of language; but, once 
knowing the 32nd of Deuteronomy, the 
119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, 
the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the 
Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and 
having always a way of thinking with my- 


THE BIBLE AND LITERARY STYLE 71 


self what words meant, it was not possible 
for me, even in the foolishest times of 
youth, to write entirely superficial or for- 
mal HKnglish.’? If a boy wishes to be- 
come a great writer or orator he cannot 
do better than follow Ruskin’s example, 
and commit large portions of the Bible to 
memory, for the simple and stately lan- 
guage of the Bible will then become the 
standard by which, through life, he will 
test all he reads, writes, or speaks. In 
Our Fathers Have Told Us Ruskin says: 
‘‘Indeed, the Psalter alone, which prac- 
tically was the service book of the Church 
for many ages, contains merely in the 
first half of it the sum of personal and 
social wisdom. The Ist, 8th, 12th, 14th, 
15th, 19th, 23rd, and 24th Psalms, well 
learned and believed, are enough for all 
personal guidance; the 48th, 72nd, and 
75th, have in them the law and the proph- 
ecy of all righteous government; and every 
real triumph of natural science is antici- 
pated in the 104th. 

‘‘Hor the contents of the entire Bible, 
consider what other group of historic and 
didactic literature has a range comparable 
to it. There are: 


72 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


1. The stories of the Fall and of the 
Flood, the grandest human traditions 
founded on a true horror of sin. : 

2. The story of the Patriarchs, of which 
the effective truth is visible to this day in 
the policy of the Jewish and Arab races. 

3. The story of Moses, with the results 
of that tradition in the moral law of all the 
civilized world. 

4. The story of the Kings—virtually 
that of all Kinghood in David, and of all 
Philosophy in Solomon!—culminating in 
the Psalms and Proverbs, with the still 
more close and practical wisdom of He- 
clesiasticus and the Son of Sirach. 

5. The story of the Prophets—virtually 
that of the deepest mystery, tragedy, and 
permanent fate, of national existence. 

6. The story of Christ. 

7. The moral law of St. John, and his 
closing Apocalypse of its fulfillment. 


The Bible Unmatched By Any Other 
Interature 
‘‘Think, if you can match that table of 
contents in any other—I do not say ‘book’ 
but ‘literature.’ Think, so far as it is 


THE BIBLE AND LITERARY STYLE 73 


possible for any of us—either adversary 
or defender of the faith—to extricate his 
intelligence from the habit and the asso- 
ciation of moral] sentiment based upon the 
Bible, what literature could have taken its 
place, or fulfilled its function, though 
every library in the world had remained 
unravaged, and every teacher’s truest 
words had been written down? 

‘‘T am no despiser of profane literature. 
So far from it, that I believe no interpre- 
tations of Greek religion have ever been 
so affectionate, none of Roman religion so 
reverent, as those which will be found at 
the base of my art teaching, and current 
through the entire body of my works. But 
it was from the Bible that I learned the 
symbols of Homer, and the faith of 
Horace.’’ It has been said that ‘‘On the 
Psalms is founded much of Ruskin’s xs- 
thetic teaching. The guiding principle of 
Modern Painters is that glad submission 
to the Divine law which is the keynote of 
Psalm 119.’’ Of this Psalm, Ruskin says: 
‘‘It is strange that of all the pieces of the 
Bible which my mother thus taught me, 
that which cost me most to learn, and 


74 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


which was, to my child’s mind, chiefly re- 
pulsive—the 119th Psalm-—has now be- 
come of all the most precious to me in its 
overflowing and glorious passion of love 
for the law of God.’’ 


Vill 
THE AUTHOR’S LAMP AND LIGHT 


HE Bible, which has given Chris- 

tian names to hundreds of mil- 
lions of Western children in the 

course of the ages, has poured its light 
through the window of every study in 
Kurope and America where books have 
been written. It has been impossible for 
men to shut out the direct or indirect rays 
of its light. Even atheists and enemies of 
the book have been indebted to it, for they 
have been born into a civilization and 
lived under a public opinion and code of 
morals founded upon the Bible. Every 
book they picked up reflects its light like 
a diamond. Every institution bears its 
impress. The Bible has so permeated civ- 
ilized life that there is no way of escape 
from its influence. It is as impossible to 
empty the world of the influence of the 
Bible as to empty the Atlantic of water. 

75 


76 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


As there is no escape from the light of the 
sun—not even at night, for it is reflected 
from the moon—so there is no escape 
from the Bible. Over the portal of every 
library the words, from Ruskin’s favorite 
Psalm—‘‘Thy word is a lamp unto my 
feet and a light unto my path’’—should 
be engraved; for the books within give out 
the light they absorbed from the Bible as 
coals give out the light and warmth they 
derived from the sun. | 


Addison’s Lamp 


To Joseph Addison, the famous essayist 
of the Spectator papers, the Bible was as 
a lamp on his study table, and he wrote in 
its light. In the Spectator of July 26, 
1712, he paraphrased the 23rd Psalm, and 
on August 23rd of the same year he ren- 
dered the 19th Psalm into a metrical ver- 
sion. This version, ‘‘The spacious firma- 
ment on high,’’ has been sung by millions 
who have never read a page of his famous 
essays. His version of the 31st Psalm, 
‘‘When all thy mercies, O my God,’’ is 
known to all English-speaking peoples. 
Cardinal Newman, whose hymns ‘‘Lead, 
Kindly Light’’ and ‘‘Praise to the Holiest 


THE AUTHOR’S LAMP AND LIGHT 77 


in the Height’’ are sung in all the churches, 
was one of the supreme masters of the 
English tongue. His Apologia is a mas- 
terpiece which all who desire to culti- 
vate literary taste should read. His 
familiarity with the Bible is evident 
in all he writes, and not least in 
the Dream of Gerontius, wherein he 
imagines the souls of the departed 
singing the 90th Psalm. Charles Kings- 
ley, another master of language, and 
the antagonist in reply to whom New- 
man’s Apologia was written, found in the 
Bible his source of strength. The 76th 
Psalm, from which John Endicott’s party 
took the name ‘‘Salem’’ for their first set- 
tlement in America, was the favorite 
Psalm of Kingsley and expresses the 
spirit that breathes through Westward 
Ho! and his other books. Robert Louis 
Stevenson, whose position as a ‘‘lord of 
language’’ is questioned by none, says: 
‘<The next book, in order of time, to influ- 
ence me, was the New Testament, and in 
particular the Gospel according to St. 
Matthew. I believe it would startle and 
move anyone if they could make a certain 
effort of imagination and read it freshly 


78 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


like a book, not droningly and dully like 
a portion of the Bible. Anyone would 
then be able to see in it those truths which 
we are all courteously supposed to know 
and all modestly refrain from applying.’’ 


Handing on the Torch 


W. T. Stead, who went down in the 
Titanic, was one of the most picturesque 
journalists of his time. He was a man in 
whom the subconscious life, which makes 
for greatness, was highly developed. 
Three weeks before he was drowned he 
was staying with a friend of mine, a few 
minutes’ walk from where I am writing, 
and one morning he told his host that in a 
dream his boy who was, as we say, dead, 
had said to him: ‘‘I think you are going 
to come to us very soon; we don’t want 
you to come yet, but I think you will.’’ 
Stead was more than a journalist; he was 
a hero and a prophet. I owe him a debt 
which I acknowledged to him before he 
died. He had issued a series of Penny 
Poets, and I spent a penny on Burns. No 
one ever got more for a thousand pounds 
than I got for that penny. The book 
changed my life. Burns came back from 


THE AUTHOR’S LAMP AND LIGHT 79 


the grave. He took me by the hand and 
led me forth to see the life of nature and 
the life of men. He touched my eyes with 
his fingers and I beheld the joy and pathos, 
the love and beauty, the hardship and 
heroism of everyday life. For weeks I 
glanced at his poems, in spare moments, 
while at work, and committed them to 
memory. At night I sang his songs to 
atrocious tunes of my own which provoked 
a chorus of protests from those who had 
gone to bed and could see no pleasure in 
‘fa night with Burns.’’ It was my intel- 
lectual awakening. Until then I had never 
read a line of verse with understanding or 
delight. Poetry was more prosy to me 
than prose, but when Burns began to 
speak it I sat at his feet entranced and let 
the world go by. It is because Stead in- 
troduced me to Burns that I linger over 
his name. When I wrote to Stead, he un- 
derstood my experience, for, in his youth, 
James Russell Lowell had done for him 
what Burns did for me. In estimating the 
influences which led him to take up ‘‘the 
cause of the disinherited everywhere,’’ he 
puts the Bible first, Lowell second, and 
Victor Hugo third. Stead’s path was 


80 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


often dark, and he was put in prison for 
publishing his chivalrous articles, The 
Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, but 
the Bible was ‘‘a lamp unto his feet and 
a light unto his path.’’ He says: ‘‘ While 
the Bible of the race is being written, from 
age to age, the Bible—as the Old and New 
Testament are rightly described—remains 
the most valuable of all the revelations of 
the Divine will. It is not one book, but 
many books, some of which have influenced - 
me deeply; others have not influenced me 
at all. 


A Great Editor’s Testumony 

‘‘The first time I felt the influence of the 
Bible was when I first went to a boarding » 
school. I was unspeakably miserable and 
forlorn. I was only twelve, and had never 
been away from home before. It was then 
I discovered the consolatory influence of 
many of the Psalms. Take them all 
round, the Psalms are probably the best 
reading in the world when you are hard- 
hit and ready to perish. After I left 
school, Proverbs influenced me most; and 
TIT remember when I was first offered an 


THE AUTHOR’S LAMP AND LIGHT 81 


editorship, reading all the Proverbs relat- 
ing to kings as affording the best advice 
I was likely to get anywhere as to the right 
discharge of editorial duties. When I was 
busy with active direct work among the 
ignorant and poor, the story of Moses’ 
troubles with the Jews in the wilderness 
was most helpful. Later, when, from 1876 
to 1878, no one knew when he went to bed 
but that by morning Lord Beaconsfield 
would have plunged the Empire into war, 
the Hebrew prophets formed my Bible. 
In 1885 it was the story of the Evangel- 
ists. If I had to single out any one chap- 
ter which I am conscious of having influ- 
enced me most, I should say the first of 
Joshua, with its oft-repeated exhortation 
to be strong and to be very courageous; 
and if I had to single out any particu- 
lar verses, it would be those which were 
taught me when a boy, and which I long 
afterwards saw on the wall of General 
Gordon’s room at Southampton: ‘Trust in 
the Lord with all thy heart; lean not unto 
thine own understanding. In all thy ways 
acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy 
paths!’ ’’ 


82 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


Omar Khayyam and Ecclesiastes 
Kidward FitzGerald was a man of a dif- 
ferent type from Stead, but he had a per- 
fect mastery of English. And his English ~ 
has the simplicity of the Bible. His lines: 


And ere to bed 

Go we, go we, 
Down on the ashes 

We kneel on the knee, 
Praying together, 


are as simple and beautiful as a child. 
And his stanza: 

Yon rising Moon that looks for us again— 

How oft hereafter will she wax and wane; 


How oft hereafter rising look for us 
Through this same Garden—and for one in vain, 


wets the eyes like the words of Ecclesi- 
astes: ‘‘Truly the light is sweet, and a 
pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold 
the sun: but if a man live many years and 
rejoice in them all; yet let him remember 
the days of darkness; for they shall be 
many.’’ FitzGerald’s English was Bible 
English, as the above quotations show, 
and to FitzGerald the Bible was ‘‘no 
strange land.’’ For his tombstone Fitz- 
Gerald chose the text: ‘‘It is He that hath 
made us, and not we ourselves.’’ Heclesi- 


THE AUTHOR’S LAMP AND LIGHT 83 


astes, of whom the translator of 
The Rubdéydt reminds us, is a favorite 
with Sir Rider Haggard, the writer of 
King Solomon’s Mines. He says: ‘‘And 
there is one immortal work that moves me 
still more—a work that utters all the 
world’s yearning anguish and disillusion- 
ment in one sorrow-laden and bitter ery, 
and whose stately music thrills like the 
voice of pines heard in the darkness of a 
midnight gale; and that is the book of 
Keclesiastes.’’ John Stuart Blackie, 
whose wholesome writings had a power- 
ful influence on the men of his time, de- 
elares: ‘‘To the Bible I am indebted for 
the greatest blessing that can happen to a 
young man at his first launch out of boy- 
hood into youth, viz., the grip which it 
gave me of the grand significance of human 
life, and of the possibilities of human 
nature when true to its highest inspira- 
tions. I was not more than fifteen years 
old when I was moved to adopt the ideal 
ethics of the Gospel as my test of senti- 
ment and my standard of conduct; and to 
this I adhered steadily thenceforward, 
just as a young seaman would stick to his 
compass and to his chart, and a young 


84 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


pedestrian to his map of an unknown 
country.’’? It was the Bible which taught 
him ‘‘the grand significance of human 
life,’’? and without that knowledge no man 
can write what it is worth any man’s while 
to read. 


IX 


THE BIBLE’S TRANSMISSION 
OF LIFE 


HAT Hamilton Wright Mabie 
\ \) calls ‘‘the literature of power”’ 
is undying, because it is the 

manifold experiences of the spirit distilled 
and stored up in letters. Like harvests of 
grapes, successive generations of men are 
trodden in the wine-press of life and the 
emotions produced in this process are fer- 
mented by thought, and drained off into 
books. These books, formed into libraries, 
are like wayside inns at which the pilgrim, 
traveling from the cradle to the grave, 
may take his choice, and, if he but drink 
deeply enough, go on his way refreshed. 
Wordsworth has defined poetry as ‘‘emo- 
tion remembered in tranquillity.’’ All 
great and wise books may be defined as 
‘femotion remembered in tranquillity’’ 
and refined by the more or less uncon- 


scious process of thought. Milton asserts 
85 


86 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


that to write a great poem the poet’s life 
must be a great poem. In other words, 
literature grows out of life. To write 
deeply a man must live deeply. A book 
is the measure of its author’s inner life. 
The failure and triumph of Burns and the 
vices and virtues of Byron are clearly re- 
vealed in their poems. All true writing is 
conscious, or unconscious, autobiography. 
It is a self-revelation, and no doubt the 
author sometimes regrets having taken the 
world into his confidence. He was really 
talking to himself when the printing press 
took up his words and gave them to the 
world. Deliberate autobiographies are 
doubtful as histories, but essays and 
poems are unconscious autobiography, 
and therefore reliable. No one should 
write whose dominant desire is to keep his 
inner life a secret, for his secret will leak 
out through his words as blood leaks 
through a wound no matter how carefully 
bandaged. 


The Spiritual History of the Puritans 


Milton’s inner life was as great as his 
ereatest poem. By the side of Cromwell 


TRANSMISSION OF LIFE 87 


he had worked till he was blind, trying to 
build an earthly paradise, but in his old 
age he saw their Puritan Paradise de- 
- stroyed; Cromwell’s body dug up and his 
head placed on a pike for the mob to gaze 
at; and blind, defeated, and forsaken, Mil- 
ton retired to a humble home to write his 
Paradise Lost. All that life meant to 
Milton, and all there was in it of sweet- 
ness and bitterness, was distilled into 
Paradise Lost. There you will find his 
life’s attar of roses and its wormwood. 
Yea, more than that you will find. Be- 
eause Milton was a poet, and had all the 
sensitiveness and imaginative sympathy 
of a poet, you will find, to a large extent, 
all that life meant to the Puritans as a 
people; for, as rivers attract and absorb 
into theniselves all the streams that come 
near them, so great writers absorb the ex- 
periences of the men whose lives touch 
theirs. Milton and Bunyan lived greatly, 
the Puritans lived greatly, and as a conse- 
quence you have, in Milton’s Paradise 
Lost and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, 
two great books containing all that is vital 
and indestructible in the Puritan era. 


88 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


These two books contain the storm and 
stress, the hopes and fears, the ideals and 
failures of the age of the Puritans ‘‘re- 
membered in tranquillity.’’ The bodies of 
the Puritans lie mouldering in the grave, © 
but, in these two books, their souls go 
marching on. These two books are the 
arms with which, like Samson, the Puri- 
tan, while dying, pulled down the pillars 
upon which the old world was built. The 
Bible begets life because it was begotten 
of life. It deals with the vital experiences 
common to all men, ancient or modern, 
Jews or Gentiles, whether Hast or West 
of Suez. 


The Terms on Which Life is Granted 

It knows the terms on which man’s short 
lease of life is granted, and teaches us how 
to live within the terms to the best advan- 
tage. ‘‘Man that is born of a woman is of 
few days, and full of trouble. He com- 
eth forth like a flower, and is cut down: 
he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth 
NOt. vid EE aman: die, shall nevis 
again? All the days of my appointed time 
will I wait, till my change come. Thou 
shalt call, and I will answer thee; thou 


TRANSMISSION OF LIFE 89 


wilt have a desire to the work of thine 
hands.’’ Those are the terms upon which 
life is granted to men, and the Bible bases 
its philosophy of life upon them. And any 
philosophy that ignores them is built on 
shifting sand, and cannot endure through 
the ages as the Bible has endured. The 
young Heine, with his Hellenic tempera- 
ment, wrote: ‘‘Life is all too laughably 
sweet, and the world too delightfully be- 
wildered; it is a dream of an intoxicated 
god. . . . Life is the greatest good and 
death the worst evil. . . . Red life 
pulses in my veins, earth yields beneath 
my feet, in the glow of love I embrace 
trees and statues, and they live in my em- 
brace. Every instant is to me an eternity, 
and I need no priest to promise me a sec- 
ond life. The great pulsation of nature 
beats too in my breast, and when I carol 
aloud I am answered by a thousand-fold 
echo. I hear a thousand nightingales. 
Spring has sent them to awaken Earth 
from her morning slumber, and Earth 
trembles with ecstasy; her flowers are 
hymns, which she sings in inspiration to 
the sun—the sun moves far too slowly; | 
would fain lash on his steeds that they 


90 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


might advance more rapidly.’’ Alas! 
Heine has forgotten the terms of life and 
the advice of Ecclesiastes: ‘‘ Remember 
now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, 
while the evil days come not nor the years 
draw nigh when thou shalt say I have no 
pleasure in them.’’ But when, in 1848, 
paralysis came and stretched him on his 
‘mattress-grave,’ he bade good-bye to his 
Greek gods and pagan philosophies and 
took to the Bible, ‘‘like Uncle Tom.’’ 


Greek Youths and Hebrew Men 

After five years of hopeless suffering, 
he says in his Confessions: ‘‘My prejudice 
in favor of Hellas has declined. I see now 
that the Greeks were only beautiful youths, 
but that the Jews were always men, strong, 
unyielding men.’’ While a man lives 
lightly, sporting like a butterfly in the 
sun, he may have little use for the Bible, 
but when the day darkens and night comes 
on he takes out his father’s Bible to be ‘‘a 
lamp unto his feet and a light unto his 
path.’’ The Bible, from the first chapter 
to the last, holds on with both hands to the 
eternal in human life; to the things that 


TRANSMISSION OF LIFE 91 


forever recur. Isaac thinks his life will 
take a road untrodden by men before, but 
soon he finds himself pitching ‘‘his tent in 
the valley of Gerar,’’ where his father had 
been in days long past. Then, ‘‘Isaac 
digged again the wells of water, which 
they had digged in the days of Abraham 
his father; for the Philistines had stopped 
them after the death of Abraham: and he 
called their names after the names by 
which his father had called them 

and found there a well of spring water.’’ 
There you have all human history in a 
nutshell. When Isaac stands where his 
father stood—as he must some day—he 
opens the wells his father dug, and when 
he has drunk of the ‘‘springing water’’ he 
calls them ‘‘after the names by which his 
father had called them.’’ Gerar is the 
valley of life. Joy like gentle summer 
rain, sorrow and pain like blinding snow- 
storms, cloudbursts and wild pitiless rains 
have beaten upon its face and sunk into its 
depths, but, ‘‘after many days,’’ these wa- 
ters have come springing forth, pure and 
cool, as ‘‘emotion remembered in tran- 
quillity,’’ and have formed a well that we 


92. THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


call the Bible, as our fathers did, and 
which will never run dry. 


The Tears of One Age Form a Well for 
Another 

The men and women of the Bible ‘‘pass- 
ing through the valley of Baca make 
it a well; the rain also filleth the pools.’’ 
Out of the rain of tears God has taken the 
salt, and now it makes a well of spring 
water. Men ‘‘wandered in the wilderness 
in a solitary way; they found no city to 
dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul 
fainted in them. Then they cried unto the 
Lord in their trouble, and he delivered 
them out of their distresses. And he led 
them forth by the right way. ... He turneth 
the wilderness into a standing water, and 
dry ground into watersprings. And there 
he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they 
may prepare a city for habitation.’’ Life 
forces us to pitch our tents where the He- 
brew fathers pitched theirs, and we drink 
out of the well they dug, for there is none 
other so deep. In all the great experi- 
ences of life men, who know where to look 
for help, turn to the Bible. After my 


TRANSMISSION OF LIFE 93 


father’s death I was looking through his 
note-book, when I came upon this passage 
from Isaiah: ‘‘Fear not; for I have re- 
deemed thee, I have called thee by thy 
name; thou art mine. When thou passest 
through the waters, I will be with thee; 
and through the rivers they shall not over- 
flow thee; when thou walkest through the 
fire, thou shall not be burned; neither shall 
the flame kindle upon thee. For I am thy 
God, the Holy one of Israel, thy Saviour ;’’ 
and I saw that he had been drinking at the 
old well. 


The Discoverer of Chloroform 

Sir James Simpson, the discoverer of 
chloroform, when he needed something for 
the soul, to help him to bear the pain and 
sorrow of life, turned to his ‘‘Mother’s 
Psalm’’ (the 20th), ‘‘The Lord hear thee 
in the day of trouble . . . and strengthen 
thee out of Zion.’’ After one of the bat- 
tles of the Somme, one of the iads of my 
regiment was found dead in a shell-hole, 
and holding in his pulseless hand a Bible 
open at the 23rd Psalm. He was just a 
simple ‘‘Tommy.’’ But Sir William Ham- 


94. THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE - 


ilton was a great philosopher and a man 
of immense learning, yet, when he lay 
dying he strengthened himself by repeat- 
ing from the same Psalm, ‘‘Thy rod and 
Thy staff they comfort me,’’ for, since 
Abel, death has been the same ordeal to all 
men. When the two Scottish Covenanters, 
Isabel Alison and Marion Harvie, were 
hanged at Edinburgh in 1681, Marion—a 
girl of twenty—said, as they stood on the 
scaffold, ‘‘Come, Isabel, let us sing the 
23rd Psalm.’’ How fundamental are the 
experiences with which the Bible deals is 
seen from the 5th verse of the 31st Psalm. 
In this verse, David cries: ‘‘Into thine 
hand I commit my spirit.’’ On the cross 
Jesus utters the same words (Luke 23: 46). 
They are echoed again by Stephen as he 
dies under a shower of stones, and, as we 
pass down the centuries, we hear them 
from the dying lips of Christopher Colum- 
bus, the Emperor Charles V, Renwick and 
other martyred Covenanters, John Hus, 
Martin Luther and Thomas More. John | 
Wesley and Oliver Cromwell, when dying, 
join hands across the centuries with the 
Psalmist, and repeat the words of the 46th 


TRANSMISSION OF LIFE 95 


Psalm: ‘‘God is our refuge and strength, 
a very present help in trouble.’’ 


The Bible Faces All the Facts 


The Bible faces all the facts of life. It 
never, like the Christian Scientist, puts on 
rose-colored spectacles, nor refuses, like 
the ostrich, to let its eye dwell on what is 
unpleasant. It looks on the whole of life 
and stands up to it. Omar Khayyam sees 
the vanity of human wishes and watches 
the fleetness of human life as does Ecclesi- 
astes, but he runs away from life to the tav- 
ern, where he may get drunk and forget. 
~The Bible, on the other hand, sees that our 
life, however fleeting, runs its course 
under the shadow of the Eternal God. 
‘‘Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place 
in all generations,’’ it cries. And Hcclesi- 
astes, after declaring that ‘‘all is vanity,’’ 
says: ‘‘Let us hear the conclusion of the 
whole matter: Fear God, and keep His 
commandments: for this is the whole duty 
of man. For God shall bring every work 
into judgment, with every secret thing, 
whether it be good or whether it be evil.’’ 
The Bible teaches man to face the ‘‘whole 
matter’? and stand up to life. Thus, it 


96 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE | 


‘‘oiveth power to the faint; and to them 
that have no might it increaseth strength.’’ 
It transmits life and inspires the litera- 
ture that springs from life. 


x 
-ORATORS AND THE BIBLE 


est orators England has produced. 

His style was at once sublime and 
simple. Where he got his style we know, 
for he has told us. He got it from the 
Bible, and from John Milton, who, in turn, 
was tremendously influenced by the Bible. 
Milton and the Bible were the two books in 
which Bright lived. He read them be- 
cause he loved them—the only true way of 
reading—and because he wished to culti- 
vate a taste for the highest form of speech. 
Gladstone, another great orator, put the 
Bible first in his library, and drank deeply 
of its pure streams, and after it placed 
Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Dante, and 
Bishop Butler, the last three being them- 
selves great students of the sacred Scrip- 
tures. St. Augustine ascribed his con- 
version to a passage of St. Paul which he 


read in his younger days. Gladstone did 
97 


im BRIGHT was one of the great- 


98 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE. 


not write many books; but one of the 
books he did write was The Impregnable 
Rock of Holy Scripture. 


Lloyd George 


Lloyd George is, I consider, the greatest 
orator of our day. I heard him on his 
native heath before he became famous, 
and I was charmed with his witchery of — 
words. I have seldom heard, or read, a 
speech of his in which he did not spontane- 
ously, and as the most natural way of ex- 
pressing his ideas, make allusions to the 
Bible. Some of his best speeches closed 
with a quotation from the Scriptures. He 
seems to have steeped himself in it as a 
youth. In fact, he may be described as ‘‘a 
man of one book.’’ His references to 
other books are few indeed. His general 
knowledge of literature seems to be small, 
but he knows the Bible, and this is, in it- 
self, a literary education, and has given 
his oratory wings. 

The first speech I heard Mr. Lloyd 
George give made a deep impression on. 
me. I went away convinced that he was a 
great patriot and a deeply religious man. 
During one of the blackest weeks of the 


ORATORS AND THE BIBLE ht 


War, he was present at the service in a 
little country chapel, attended by his host. 
At the close he went into the vestry to 
thank the preacher. He seemed deeply 
moved, and declared that the text, and the 
sermon based on it, had come to him as a 
word of encouragement from God. KEvi- 
dently the impression remained with him, 
for, on his return to London, he found 
time to write a letter of gratitude to the 
minister. 


Ramsay Macdonald 


At the Searborough Labor Congress I 
- heard a great speech delivered by Ramsay 
Macdonald to the members of the Inde- 
pendent Labor Party, and it was steeped 
in the spirit of the Scriptures, and con- 
tained several allusions to the Bible. 


C. H. Spurgeon 


No other man has ever spoken to such 
multitudes as C. H. Spurgeon, and had so 
great a circulation of his printed sermons 
during his lifetime. His style was pure, 
simple, and varied. It expressed perfectly 
every shade of thought and feeling. Where 
did he get this mastery of language? 


100 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


There is ne room for doubt in the matter. 
He loved the Bible, and deliberately 
adopted it as the standard of perfect 
English. He preached in Bible English 
just as Bunyan wrote in Bible English. 


Dr. Joseph Parker 


With the death of Spurgeon, Dr. Parker 
became king of the English pulpit. 
Neither man had been to college. The © 
Bible was their college. Like Spurgeon, 
Parker went to the Bible to learn how to 
speak, Every holiday he read it through 
from cover to cover. He steeped his mind 
in it, and its great language leapt from 
his tongue. He says: ‘‘I am not ashamed 
to say that the Bible has infinitely beyond 
all other books influenced my life, my 
thought, and my purpose.’’ Henry Ward 
Beecher, too, the great American preacher, 
lived in the Bible and moulded his style on 
it. His language was Bible English. Only 
half-educated people are impressed with 
long and unusual words. 


Simplicity the Highest Art 


The highest art is always simple, but 
simplicity is the most difficult thing in the 


ORATORS AND THE BIBLE 101 


world to reach. From a mountain top the 
view of the world is simple, but the diff- 
culty lies in getting up to the top of the 
mountain. Simplicity is an art that con- 
ceals art. That is why many are blind to 
the beauty of Bible English. They have 
not studied literature deeply enough. 
They are deceived by its simplicity. Deep 
waters look shallow when they are clear 
and limpid. Jump into them, and you 
must swim or drown. Bible English 
seems so simple that any schoolgirl could 
write it, but try; and you will realize that 
the men who gave us the English version 
were the lords of the English language, 
and have never been surpassed or even 
equalled. As Stopford Brooke points out, 
the greatest virtue in Tennyson was his 
simplicity, but it took a lifetime’s study to 
reach it. What so simple and what so per- 
fect as Crossing the Bar? 


Savonarola 


Savonarola, the great Dominican 
preacher, must have been one of the 
foremost orators of all time, for by the 
sceptre of his eloquence he ruled Flor- 
ence for five years as an absolute mon- 


102 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE | 


arch. <A study of his life will show that 
he found in the Scriptures the source of 
his power. While a youth, he told his 
father that his constant prayer was, 
‘‘Show thou me the way that I should walk 
in, for I lift up my soul unto thee’’ (Ps. 
143:8). His martyrdom is the proof that 
he did not shrink from the way that was 
shown to him. He had power over men 
because he lived deeply, and he was able 
to live deeply because he fed himself on 
the heavenly manna of the Scriptures. 
The Scriptures made him strong to preach 
and strong to suffer. In prison he was put 
to the torture to make him recant. His 
torturers broke his left arm and tore the 
shoulder-bone from its socket. In his 
agony he found comfort in writing medi- 
tations on the 31st and 5list Psalms. He 
writes: ‘‘Bowed at the feet of the Lord, 
my eyes bathed with tears, I cried, ‘The 
Lord is my light and my salvation; whom 
shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of 
my life; of whom then shall I be afraid? 
Though a host of men were set against me, 
yet shall not my heart be afraid; and 
though there rose up war against me, yet 
will I put my trust in Him.’’’ In this 


ORATORS AND THE BIBLE 103 


confidence he slept like a child on the night 
before his execution and was seen smiling 
in his sleep. 


Edward Irving 


One of the greatest orators of the nine- 
teenth century was Edward Irving, founder 
of the Irvingites, the disappointed lover 
of Jane Welsh and the friend of Thomas 
Carlyle. For a time he had London at his 
feet fascinated with his oratory. ‘‘Hour 
after hour’’ crowds listened to his ser- 
mons. Yet the end of his life was pathetic’ 
in the extreme. His mental balance be- 
- came disturbed, and his teaching was con- 
sidered to be at variance with that of his 
Church. The Church took action against 
him and he was forbidden to. administer 
the sacraments. He continued on his way, 
believing in his mission, but his heart was 
broken, and Death kindly opened her arms 
to him and gave him shelter. 

‘‘When,’’ says Rowland EK. Prothero, 
‘‘other comforts had failed and fame had 
fled, he clung still to his Bible, and made 
the Psalms his constant companions. 
‘How in the night seasons,’ he writes, ‘the 
Psalms have been my consolations against 


104 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


the faintings of flesh and spirit!’ For a 
few weeks he was able to preach, though 
at forty-two his gaunt, gigantic frame 
bore all the marks of age and weakness. 
His face was wasted, his hair white, his 
voice broken, his eyes restless and unquiet. 
As November drew to its close his feeble- 
ness increased, till it was evident that his 
life was rapidly passing away. His mind 
began to wander. Those who watched at 
the bedside could not understand the 
broken utterances spoken in an unknown 
tongue by his faltering voice. But at last 
it was found that he was repeating to him- 
self, in Hebrew, Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is 
my Shepherd.’ It was with something 
like its old power that the dying voice 
swelled as it uttered the glorious convic- 
tion, ‘Though I walk through the valley 
of the shadow of death, I will fear no 
evil.’ The last articulate words that fell 
from his lips were, ‘If I die, I die unto 
the Lord.’ And with these he passed 
away at midnight on December 7, 1834.’’ 
It is when the tornado has passed, and 
left the building a wreck, that we see ex- ° 
posed the mighty and unbroken pillars 
and foundations upon which it rested 


ORATORS AND THE BIBLE 105 


while it gave shelter to men; and it is 
amid the wreckage of Irving’s life that we 
see the source of his power and under- 
stand his sway over the hearts of men. 
Irving lived deeply. He drank at the 
sacred springs of the Bible. When, at 
last, the years of famine came and all 
other streams dried up and he was alone 
in the wilderness, he, like Elijah, still 
found one stream flowing—the stream 
which had nourished him from his youth 
up. Men rejected his theories as unbal- 
anced, but they felt the power of his spirit. 
Deep called unto deep. 


XI 


SIX BOOKS THAT MADE LINCOLN 
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED 
STATES 


field of Gettysburg, where the turn- 

ing point in the Civil War was 
reached. It was there that Lincoln made 
an immortal speech in commemoration of 
the heroic dead. Another spoke before 
him and made a rousing speech. It is for- 
gotten. Lincoln spoke, and the people 
were disappointed. The speech was ex- 
tremely short, simple, and quietly spoken. 
There seemed nothing in it. Lincoln had 
been outshone by the eloquent speaker be- 
fore him. So this was the great Lincoln! 
In the presence of all those newly filled 
graves he had failed! The people had 
asked him for bread to sustain their sink- — 
ing spirits, and he had given them a stone. 


Father Abraham had failed his people. 
106 


S time ago I stood on the Battle- 


LINCOLN AND SIX BOOKS 107 


He had proved unequal to his reputation. 
He had justified the saying of a more 
clever but smaller man that, ‘‘Lincoln 
would make a good President if he could 
have some one to write his speeches for 
him.’’ Lincoln’s speech was printed. It 
did not take up much room in the newspa- 
pers. Men of literary taste and insight 
read it. They read it again and again. 
Then they gave their judgment, and pro- 
nounced the speech to be one of the great- 
est ever given by man to men. ‘Those who 
had heard the speech had been deceived by 
its simplicity. Its delicacy, profundity, 
and perfection had escaped them. A gen- 
eration has passed, and now all men 
know that, whatever happens to other 
statesmen’s speeches, Lincoln’s words will 
reverberate down the avenues of Time, 
while men have ears to hear and hearts to 
understand. They know that the Gettys- 
burg address is a perfect pearl whose 
lustre will never grow dim. 


The Growth of Lincoln’s Greatness 

During the Great War Lincoln was 
quoted more in England than any other 
man whose tongue Death had stilled. As 


108 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


the tragedy of the War deepened, the fig- 
ure of Lincoln loomed out of the darkness 
and shone with a light that never was on 
sea or land. In the deep darkness through 
which they were passing, Englishmen saw 
the greatness of Lincoln as they had never 
seen it before. As the cathedral at Lin- 
coln towers above the houses on a stormy 
night, so he towered above ordinary men 
and seemed as English as our own cathe- 
dral. We listened to his voice as we listen 
to the cathedral bells of Lincoln, and it 
seemed to come from as far above us. 
Where did Lincoln get his deep under- 
standing of the processes of life and his 
perfect mastery of the English tongue? 
He got these things in his father’s log 
cabin out in the wilderness. The boy was 
father to the man. Lincoln grew greater 
daily. As you study his life, you can al- 
most see him growing. The growth was 
steady and continuous, ‘‘unhasting and 
unresting’’ to the last hour of his life. 
To find the soil which nourished his ever- 
growing personality and gave it the power 
of expression, you must turn to his boy- . 
hood. All his schooling he computes to 
have covered no more than twelve months. 


LINCOLN AND SIX BOOKS 109 


It is therefore obvious that his mastery of 
English did not come from the school. 
Where did he get it? He got it from 
his books. What were his books? Lord 
Charnwood, in his Life of Abraham Lin- 
coln, says: ‘‘Having learned to read, he 
had the following books within his reach: 
The Bible, Asop’s Fables, Robinson Cru- 
soe, Pilgrim’s Progress, a History of 
the United States, and Weems’ Ife of 
Washington. These books he did read, 
and read again, and pondered, not with 
any dreamy or purely intellectual interest, 
but like one who desires the weapon of 
learning for practical ends, and desires 
also to have patterns of what life should 
be. There is some advantage merely in 
being driven to make the most of few 
books; great advantage in having one’s 
choice restricted by circumstances to good 
books.’’ 


The Tendencies of Lincoln’s Life 


Study the tendencies of Lincoln’s life in 
the light of the tendencies of these six 
books, and you will perhaps agree that 
they made him President of the United 
States. His one biography is of the first 


110 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


President—himself a lover of the Bible. 

This book would give direction to Lin- 
coln’s ambition, and it is the only direc- 
tion his ambition ever seems to have taken. 
His one history is of the United States— 
a nation founded by the Bible-reading 
Puritans and it is noteworthy that nearly 
all his speeches are broad-based on the 
constitutional history of his country. 
/EHsop’s Fables were suitable nourish- 
ment for a man who was to be famous 
for his humor, common sense, and short 
stories conveying moral lessons. Lonely, 
self-reliant Robinson Crusoe, with a ser- 
vant in man Friday, but no equal for com- 
panionship, will stand as a portrait for 
Lincoln himself. Lincoln was as isolated 
as Crusoe, and as self-reliant. He had 
men about him whom he loved and by 
whom he was beloved, but they were his 
servants rather than his companions, for 
he had no equal and walked alone. /Pil- 
grim’s Progress was equally suitable for 
one who had to pass through such spir- 
itual conflicts as Lincoln. What fights he 
had with Giant Despair, what imprison- 
ments in Doubting Castle, what arguments — 
with Worldly Wiseman, what Lions to 


LINCOLN AND SIX BOOKS vie 


pass between, and what a dark crossing of 
the River of Death, before Stanton could 
say: ‘‘Now he belongs to the ages.’’ And 
then the Bible! Rightly it stands first in 
Lord Charnwood’s list of six. The Bible 
is the standard of the English language— 
‘fa well of English undefiled,’? and Lin- 
coln was to be one of the great masters 
of the English tongue. Of the six books 
with which Lincoln was imprisoned in the 
wilderness four are masterpieces, and 
these taught him to speak a language as 
simple as their own. AVsop’s Fables are 
Greek stories belonging to the sixth cen- 
tury before Christ and translated into 
simple English. 


The Homeliness of Lincoln and Bunyan 


Pilgrim’s Progress is written in the 
homeliest English our literature has pro- 
duced. It owes its origin directly and en- 
tirely to the English translation of the 
Bible which Bunyan knew almost by heart. 
Robinson Crusoe also is written in Bible 
English. Defoe was born soon after the 
great outburst of Bible reading. He en- 
tered upon life in 1661, thirty-three years 
after Bunyan. In his youth he had the 


112 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


idea of becoming a dissenting minister, 
and his writings carry on the literary im- 
pulse given by the translation of the Bible 
into English. Lincoln was nurtured on the 
Bible and the Puritan masterpieces which 
it produced. His supremacy as an orator 
hes in the fact that, more than any other 
man of his time, he spoke in the purest 
and simplest Bible English. It is instrue- 
tive to read his speeches in chronological 
order and observe how the Bible grows 
upon him as the days darken and responsi- 
bilities grow heavier. His boyish reading 
in the Bible had sunk into his: nature as 
rain sinks into the soil, and, for a time, it 
seemed almost forgotten, but when sorrow 
had broken open the deeps of his soul, it 
poured itself forth as a sweet spring, and 
gave him strength to bear the heat and 
burden of the day. 


A Mind Saturated With the Bible 


‘*T¢ astonished the self-improving young 
Herndon,’’ says Lord Charnwood, ‘‘that 
the serious books Lincoln read were few, 
and that he seldom seemed to read the 
whole of them—though with the Bible, 
Shakespeare, and to a less extent Burns, 


LINCOLN AND SIX BOOKS 113 


he saturated his mind.’’ That Lincoln had 
saturated his mind with the Bible I will 
show by a passage chosen almost at ran- 
dom, from the debate with Judge Douglas: 
‘“‘The Judge has read from my speech in 
Springfield in which I say that ‘a house 
divided against itself cannot stand.’ Does 
the Judge say it can stand? I don’t know 
whether he does or not. The Judge does 
not seem to be attending to me just now, 
but I would like to know if it is his opinion, 
that a house divided against itself can 
stand. If he does, then there is a question 
of veracity, not between him and me, but 
between the Judge and an authority of a 
somewhat higher character.’’ There you 
have a quotation from the Bible placed in 
a setting almost as simple as the language 
of the Bible itself. Speaking of Lincoln’s 
replies to Judge Douglas, Lord Charn- 
wood says: ‘‘Passages abound in these 
speeches which to almost any literary taste 
are arresting for the simple beauty of 
their English, a beauty characteristic of 
one who had learned to reason with Euclid 
and learned to feel and to speak with the 
authors of the Bible. And in their own 
kind they were a classic and probably un- 


114 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


surpassed achievement.’’ When Lincoln 
spoke, says Mr. Choate, ‘‘he was trans- 
formed: his eye kindled, his voice rang, 
his face shone and seemed to light up the 
whole assembly. For an hour and a half 
he held his audience in the hollow of his 
hand. His style of speech and manner of 
delivery were severely simple. What 
Lowell called ‘the grand simplicities of 
the Bible,’ with which he was so familiar, 
were reflected in his discourse.”’ 


Lincoln’s Greatest Speech 


The second inaugural of Lincoln reads 
almost like a passage from the Bible, so 
full of the words and spirit of Scripture is 
it. I will quote a part of it. ‘‘Neither 
party expected for the war the magnitude 
or the duration which it has already at- | 
tained. . . . Both read the same Bible 
and pray to the same God, and each in- 
vokes His aid against the other. It may 
seem strange that any men should dare to 
ask a just God’s assistance in wringing 
their bread from the sweat of other men’s 
faces; but let us ‘judge not, that we be not 
judged.’ The prayers of both could not 
be answered. That of neither has been 


LINCOLN AND SIX BOOKS 115 


answered fully. The Almighty has His 
own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world be- 
cause of offences, for it must needs be that 
offences come; but woe to that man by 
whom the offence cometh.’ If we shall 
suppose that American slavery is one of 
these offences, which in the providence of 
God must needs come, but which, having 
continued through His appointed time, He 
now wills to remove, and that He gives to 
both North and South this terrible war as 
the woe due to those by whom the offence 
came, shall we discern therein any de- 
parture from those divine attributes which 
the believers in a living God always 
ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fer- 
vently do we pray, that this mighty 
scourge of war may soon pass away. Yet 
if God wills that it continue until all the 
wealth piled by the bondman’s two hun- 
dred and fifty years of unrequited toil 
shall be sunk, and until every drop of 
blood drawn with the lash shall be paid 
with another drawn with the sword; as 
was said three thousand years ago, so still 
it must be said, ‘The judgments of the 
Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ 
‘¢With malice towards none, with char- 


116 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


ity for all, with firmness in the right as 
God gives us to see the right, let us strive 
on to finish the work we are in, to bind up 
the nation’s wounds, to care for him who 
shall have borne the battle and for his 
widow and orphans, to do all which may 
achieve and cherish a just and a lasting 
peace among ourselves and with all na- 
tions.’’ 

In his presidential candidature speech, 
Lincoln said: ‘‘I am nothing, but truth is 
everything; I know that I am right be- 
cause I know that liberty is right, for 
Christ teaches it, and Christ is God.’’ 
Lord Charnwood says: ‘‘He (Lincoln) 
loved the Bible and knew it intimately— 
he is said also by the way to have stored 
in his memory a large number of hymns.’’ 
In the year before his death Lincoln wrote 
to Speed: ‘‘I am profitably engaged in 
reading the Bible. Take all of this book 
upon reason that you can and the balance 
upon faith, and you will live and die a bet- 
ter man.’’ 


XII 


THE MASTER LIGHT OF OUR 
KNOWLEDGE OF HUMAN NATURE 


HE vital nature of the Bible is 
| shown in its treatment of David. 

A conventional writer would have 
described David as a hypocrite, despite the 
difficulty of accounting for his Psalms on 
that basis; or else he would have taken 
hold of the other horn of the dilemma and 
would have whitewashed David by sup- 
pressing the evidence against him. The 
Bible does not call David a hypocrite, but 
‘‘the man according to God’s own heart.’’ 
And on the other hand, it neither sup- 
presses the account of his sins nor glosses 
over them. It gives them in all their black- 
ness. Unlike conventional writers, the 
Bible pierces through the outward cover- 
ing of man to the heart. 


Not on the vulgar mass 

Called “ work,” must sentence pass, 

Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 
117 


118 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


O’er which from level stand, 
The low world laid its hand, 
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 


But all the world’s coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 

So passed in making up the main account; 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 

That weigh’d not as his work, yet swell’d the man’s 
amount, 


Thoughts hardly to be pack’d 

Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped; 

All I could never be, 

All men ignored in me— ; 

This was I worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
shaped, 

The Biblical writer saw the strength of 
David’s temptations, and the vigor and 
persistency with which he fought them be- 
fore, tired and beaten, he was overthrown. 
He also saw how deep and sincere was 
David’s repentance, and how quickly he 
was on his feet again to fight the enemy 
which, in an evil hour, had worsted him. 
He saw David’s ideals and accomplish- 
ments, as well as his faults and failures. 


Carlyle on David 

In Heroes and Hero-Worship, Carlyle 
says: ‘‘David’s life and history, as writ- 
ten for us in those Psalms of his, I con- 


HUMAN NATURE 119 


sider to be the truest emblem ever given 
of a man’s moral progress and warfare 
here below. All earnest souls will ever 
discern in it the faithful struggle of an 
earnest human soul towards what is good 
and best. Struggle often baffled, sore 
baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a 
struggle never ended; ever, with tears, re- 
pentance, true unconquerable purpose, 
begun anew.’’ Whatever character the 
Bible portrays, whether St. John, St. 
Peter, St. Paul, Judas (who was meant to 
have saint before his name), Ananias the 
liar, Simon the Sorcerer, Saul, Balaam, 
Lot or Elijah, it reveals him to the marrow 
of his bones. He is put under the X-rays 
and shown to the world as he is and not 
merely as he appears. This is apparent in 
the portraits of Jacob and Esau. At first 
sight most of us would prefer Esau to 
Jacob. Jacob seems despicable in his 
youth, and Esau not a bad sort. But the 
Bible probes deeper. It sees the fatal 
flaw in Ksau—he is profane; and the sav- 
ing grace in Jacob—he has reverence. 
Ksau never did anything so mean as 
Jacob, but neither did he ever do anything 
so noble. Isaac preferred Esau, but Isaac 


120 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


was blind, as fathers often are. ‘The 
mother saw through her children, as moth- 
ers do, and chose Jacob. She saw his pos- 
sibilities and took long views. Isaac only 
thought of the immediate—the venison 
that Esau brought him. Esau never saw 
any ladder of angels such as Jacob saw at 
Bethel. He could not, for he had no eyes 
in his soul. He lacked reverence. He was 
a profane person. Nor could Esau look on 
a woman and love her as Jacob loved 
Rachel, when he met her next day, with his 
face shining and the light of the vision 
still in his eyes. Esau was capable of pas- 
sion, but not of a lifelong love such as 
Jacob gave Rachel, and which made 
‘seven years seem unto him but a few 
days, for the love he had to her.’’ Esau 
was a ‘‘profane person,’’ and incapable of 
the love which is passion transformed by 
reverence into worshipping affection. Re- 
bekah, being a woman, wife and mother, 
saw the difference between the two char- 
acters, and put her trust in Jacob. 


The Ascent of a Soul 


It is only in youth that Jacob shows up ° 
badly, but ‘‘ Youth shows but half; see all; 


HUMAN NATURE 121 


the last of life for which the first was 
made.’’ Jacob throws away his meanness 
as a moth-fretted garment, and becomes 
the favorite of God and man. Jacob 
climbs steadily up the golden ladder he 
saw at Bethel, but Esau never rises above 
the earth. He is of the earth earthy. Be- 
cause in this way, the Bible reveals the 
soul within the body, it is the best book in 
the world for those who wish to under- 
stand human nature or move men by the 
spoken or written word. There is an il- 
luminating passage in Psalm 103. It says: 
‘‘He (God) made known His ways unto 
Moses, His acts unto the children of Is- 
rael.’’ The crowd only saw God’s ‘‘acts,’’ 
they could not understand His character, 
purposes, and ‘‘ways.’’ But Moses under- 
stood God’s ‘‘ways,’’ character, motives, 
and was able to relate the isolated ‘‘acts’’ 
one to another and grasp the general plan 
which God was working out. It is ever so. 
The crowd only sees the actions of a per- 
sonality, not the motives which inspire and 
relate them; but the true leader of men un- 
derstands the motives and ways of men, 
and is never taken unawares by their ac- 
tions. He may be disappointed by men, as 


122 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


Jesus was by Judas, but he is not deceived. 
One of the supreme merits of the Bible for 
the literary man is that it teaches him the 
lore of the human heart. It instructs him 
both in the ways of God and in the ways 
of men, and it is impossible for him to 
write great books (as distinct from merely 
clever ones), without this two-fold knowl- 
edge. 


The Choice of a Wife 


A man who knows human nature, may or 
may not be wise in his choice of a wife for 
himself, but he will almost certainly be 
wise in choosing a wife for his friend. 
Try the Bible by this test. The servant of 
Abraham had been sent into Mesopotamia 
to find a wife for Isaac; and, whatever the 
impressions-of that country our soldiers 
may have brought back with them, I am 
sure Isaac always loved to speak ‘‘that 
blessed word—Mesopotamia.’’ The ser- 
vant reaches the well at ‘‘the time women 
go out to draw water. And he said: ‘O 
Lord God of my master Abraham, I pray 
Thee, send me good speed this day, and 
show kindness to my master Abraham. | 
And let it come to pass, that the damsel to 


HUMAN NATURE 123 


whom I shall say, ‘‘Let down thy pitcher, 
I pray thee, that I may drink’’; and she 
shall say, ‘‘Drink, and I will give thy 
eamels drink also’’; let the same be she 
that thou hast appointed for thy servant 
Isaac.’’ What are the servant’s tests of 
character for one who is to be a good wife? 
Not beauty, for beauty without a kind 
heart is a mirage of the desert, at which 
no husband ever yet slaked the thirst of 
his soul; though beauty covering a noble 
soul is a gift of God, and Rebekah ‘‘was 
very fair to look upon.’’ Not wealth, for 
a wife’s wealth, if she has not a loving 
spirit, may be a bone of contention and a 
source of wounded pride in the man, and 
he does not need wealth with her, for he 
either has enough for both or can make 
enough. What then are the tests by which 
he will judge her character and worth as a 
woman? 


Insight Into Character 


He will judge her first, by her attitude 
towards a man who is old, a stranger, and 
a servant; and, second, by her treatment 
of dumb animals. Her attitude to the aged 
will decide her worth as a wife; and her 


124 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


attitude to dumb animals her worth as a 
mother. If she is kind to the old man and 
gives him drink when he asks, and if, out 
of the goodness of her heart she offers to 
give drink to the camels without being 
asked, she, and no other, is the woman who 
will make a good wife. Rebekah does not 
know she is under examination, but she 
passes the test. ‘‘She said moreover unto 
him: ‘We have both straw and provender 
enough, and room to lodge in.’ And the © 
man bowed down his head, and worshipped 
the Lord.’’ The question now was, would 
she go to be Isaac’s bride? The parents 
were willing, but was Rebekah? ‘‘And 
they called Rebekah and said unto her: 
‘Wilt thou go with this man?’’’ Prob- 
ably her brother thought she would be 
taken by surprise, and would want time to 
think it over. He thought that she was 
not in the secret. But it was no secret to 
Rebekah. She had known for hours. 
How? God knows! Every woman, of 
Rebekah’s femininity, knows all that is of 
any consequence about the question of her 
own marriage. The man when he proposes 
is timid, because he thinks it will come as . 
a surprise and shock to her; but she knew 


HUMAN NATURE 125 


he was going to propose to her long before 
he knew it himself. She is aware, how- 
ever, that he does not know that she knew, 
and so she blushes and says, ‘‘It’s so sud- 
den’’—and, if she delays her answer, it is 
not because she is in any doubt. It is only 
to tease him and keep him in doubt, so 
that he will be the more happy and self- 
congratulatory when she answers ‘‘Yes.’’ 
As, however, Rebekah was proposed to by 
proxy, there was no need to delay her an- 
swer. She just bent her head, and was 
still for a moment; listening to her own 
heart, and thinking perhaps of all that her 
maiden days had been to her, and of the 
far country where an unknown lover was 
‘‘meditating in the fields’’ and waiting for 
her. Then commending herself to God 
and the love of this man, she looked up, 
“And she said, ‘I will go.’ ”’ 


A Woman’s Reason 


She gave no reason for her decision. A 
woman never does, or, if she does, she 
gives the wrong one. I hold that the 
Bible’s account of the marriage proposed 
to Rebekah is unsurpassed by any writer, 
as a revelation of the heart and character 


126 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


of a woman. It is condensed into few 
words and needs thoughtful reading, but 
the Bible is not like a sloppy novelist who 
takes four hundred pages to say what can 
be said in four by one who knows his busi- 
ness. There is a novel, for any man who 
has imagination, in two verses of Genesis: 
‘‘Laban had two daughters; the name of 
the elder was Leah, and the name of the 
younger was Rachel. Leah was tender- 
eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well 
favoured. And Jacob loved Rachel.’’ 
Poor ‘‘tender-eyed Leah,’’ loving Jacob, 
but forced on him by her father’s fraud, 
and having to live as his wife by the side 
of Rachel! 


The Moulders of Men 


The Bible always portrays women as the 
moulders of men. The good woman is an 
inspirer and the bad woman a temptress. 
The woman who has personality is never 
a neutral in the affairs of men, though she 
often wears neutral colors to intervene 
more effectively. To have wise heads on 
young shoulders, young men should study 
the Bible, ‘‘Man that is born of a woman’? ’ 


' HUMAN NATURE 127 


think of the women of the Bible—Eve, 
Sarah, Hagar, Hannah, the Witch of 
Endor, Rachel, Job’s wife, Jephthah’s 
daughter, Ruth, Miriam, the ‘‘great 
woman’’ of Shunem, Rahab, Jezebel, 
Herodias, Mary Magdalene, Martha, 
Mary of Bethany, Pilate’s wife, and 
Dorcas! Truly they may sing: ‘‘I am 
Woman and glory and beauty, I mystery, 
terror and doubt.’’ Hall Caine says that 
in the Bible he has found the germ of 
every novel he has written. In poetry we 
have Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Tom 
Hood’s Ruth, and Byron’s Hebrew Melo- 
dies. They represent but a small part of 
the literature directly suggested by Bible 
characters and incidents. The human 
nature of the Bible is the very stuff of 
which literature is made. Shakespeare, 
who worshipped in the parish church at 
Stratford-on-Avon and lies buried in its 
chancel, would be the first, because the 
greatest student of human nature, to ac- 
knowledge the supremacy of the Bible, not 
only as a revelation of God but as a revela- 
tion of man. In the Bible is One who 
‘‘knew all men, and needed not that any 


128 THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE 


should testify of man: for He knew what 

was in man.’’ In comparison with Him, 

even the incomparable Shakespeare is but 
An infant crying in the night: 


An infant crying for the light: 
And with no language but a cry. 


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